My final sfDateValidator

Update: New download link.

Some time ago i began “fixing” the sfDateValidator. A few hours and some great comments (with great ideas) later, i think that it is safe to say that it’s “fixed”.

What has changed compared to the original sfDateValidator?

• Accept all (strtotime-)date-formats
• New parameters: min and max
• The compare-parameter now accepts all strtotime-formats
• New operator: !=
• UnitTests for Lime

Download the validator here!

Originally, the sfDateValidator only accepted values in the current i18n-setting language. I really didn’t found this a very good idea since most users are used to enter the date in their commonly used format. (I always use the “dd.mm.YY”-format why should i be forced to enter it in “mm/dd/YY”)?
I changed this so that the validator now accepts all values that the php strtotime-function accepts (You can even use relative values like “tomorrow” or “+1 week“).

If you want the date to be in a specific timeframe, use the new min and max parameters.
Here’s a small example:

 

fields:
  date:
    required:
      msg: This field is required
    sfDateValidator:
      min: 10.10.2007
      max: 15.10.2007

You can, of course, specify just one of those parameters to check if a date is greater or lower than the entered date.

The compare parameter now also accepts the strtotime-values instead of just the value of another form field. Combined with the min/max-parameters and the new != operator you can, for example, check if a date is in a specific timeframe but not on a specific day:

fields:
  date:
    required:
      msg: This field is required
    sfDateValidator:
      min: 'today'
      max: '+1 week'
      compare: 'next monday'
      operator: '!='

This would check if the date is in the next week, but not on monday (Because, well, let’s say you don’t work on mondays)

I also wrote some (69 to be exact) Unit tests for Lime, hoping that this will help for further development.

For the future i really hope that php 5.2 becomes a requirement for the next symfony version, this way we could use the new DateTime-class to overcome the unix-timestamp limitations and check all dates not just these from 1970 to 2038.

I hope this improvements will be useful to you, comments are always appriciated. Thanks.