Ask HN: Server/Client Validation Syncing

1 pointsm0ck5y ago2 comments

I have server exposing REST API and client (React SPA) consuming it. I already do validation of user input on the server, but now I want to add subset of it to client as well (no complicated business validation, just basic checks like min/max input length, pattern matching etc.). I identified three possible approaches to this problem.

1. Duplicate the server input constraints on client side and synchronize them manually. The easiest one to implement, potentionally difficult to maintain.

2. Expose new endpoint on server with all the constraints (allowed lengths/regex patterns), which will client load and store at the first load.

3. Validate input dynamically on server by making AJAX call on change of input. I want to avoid this one, as it could increase traffic a lot.

Thoughts/experiences on this problem?

2 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

bearjaws5y ago· 1 in thread

Another option if you are using a NodeJS backend is to write a node module that contains just the validation logic, and then share that amongst the SPA and backend. Only gotcha is it cannot include anything you wouldn't want bundled into your UI code.

At my first PHP job we used #2 from list pretty successfully, the only thing that sucked was translating the validation errors back into the UI, but I think that can be improved easily by modern UI frameworks (this was a jQuery app at the time).

m0ckOP5y ago

The backend is Java (Spring Boot), so common validation module is unfortunately not an option.

The #2 looks most promising to me as well, but I didn't find this solution anywhere, so I wanted to check if anyone actually used this approach sucessfully.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse