Valor
General, simple and easy to use structured validation library that gives you
control over the error and input types.
Motivation
Currently there are a few validation libraries out there, most notably
forma and digestive-functors. They are acceptable but they are mostly
geard towards the web. Even with that in mind, I find them a bit impractical to
use so I've decided to make a validation library of my own.
In no particular order here are the main problems I have with them:
-
They limit what you can validate and what you get as a result of that
validation. Forma expects a JSON Value as an input and gives you either parsed data as a result or an error in the form of a JSON Value.
Additionally, digestive-functors use a custom result type that you need
to get familiar with to some extent.
-
They are essentially parsers, and I personally don't like to manually handle
conversion of JSON fields from e.g. string to integers and other data types.
Sure, it might be useful to tell the user that he entered text instead of a
number, but in that case I'd argue that your submission form is bad.
Even in this case, it should still be possible to validate plain JSON with
Valor, but if that is your use case I'd recommend you use forma for that
since it was specifically designed with JSON in mind.
-
They don't really play well with servant. Let's say that we have a record
SomeData
. If we wanted to allow users to submit that data to the server we'd
have something like this :
"api" :> ReqBody '[JSON] SomeData :> Post '[JSON] SomeResponse
User would send SomeData
encoded as JSON to the server, servant would
automagically parse it and pass it to the Handler
for further processing.
If we wanted to validate this data with let's say forma than we would
have to write something like this:
"api" :> ReqBody '[JSON] Value :> Post '[JSON] SomeResponse
in which case we lose nice semantics from the first example where it is
obvious what data is being sent to the server (or at least what should've been
sent).
Since servant doesn't allow us to declare validation in the type,
validation always has to happen in the Handler
at which point it is no
longer in the JSON form and library like forma is not of much use to us
unless we convert SomeData
to JSON and parse it once again.