Validryad

A Ruby data validation tool, built to lean on dry-rb.

Other validation tools are either focused on:

• binding to user input forms,
• recreating or supplementing ActiveRecord validations, or
• supplying user-friendly error messages instead of programmatic error codes

This is a design gap I'm interested in filling, as it fits my mental model for many validation cases, and is especially suitable for APIs in a way other Ruby validation libraries are not.

The aim, then, is for Validryad to be a validation library that supplies programmatically useful validation errors, while performing some minimal coercion and alteration of the data as useful.

The library draws on the existing dry-validation library for design inspiration, while making some concretely different decisions:

• Error messages are programmatic, not user-based
• Validation is not tailored towards hashes alone, but suited for any combination of values, including hashes and arrays

Installation

(NB: This gem is not yet published)

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'validryad'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install validryad

Usage

Create a contract

class EndpointContract < Validryad::Contract
  specify(
    hash(
      mandatory: {
        url: typed(T::String), # Using dry-types loaded in module T!
        ip: typed(T::String) >
            matching(ip_re) & rule(error: :low_range) { _1.split('.').first.to_i >= 100 }
      },
      optional: {
        rate_limit: typed(T::Coercible::Decimal) > gt(0)
      }
    )
  )
end

Calling a contract

EndpointContract.call({url: 'abc.com', ip: '123.456.789.012'})
# => Success({:url=>"abc.com", :ip=>"123.456.789.012"})

EndpointContract.call({url: 'abc.com', ip: '99.456.789.012'})
# => Failure([[:low_range, [:ip]]])

EndpointContract.call({rate_limit: -2})
# Failure([[[:not_gt, 0], [:rate_limit]], [[:missing_key, :url], []], [[:missing_key, :ip], []]])

Success values are the validated values, with the right-most validation's value in cases of coercing validations, e.g. the coercion of rate_limit above to a BigDecimal.

Failure values are an array of pairs: an error message, and the path of the invalid value being addressed.

• In the examples above, [:low_range, [:ip]] is an error that tells us that the value in the path [:ip] was invalid for the reason :low_range.
• Other errors may be more complex, such as [:not_gt, 0], which indicates that the value was not greater than the expected minimum value, 0.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/armstnp/validryad.

The maintainer makes no promises regarding response times, but will make effort to be respectful of the time put in to suggestions and proposed changes.

Forking is an option! The code should be compact enough to be something you can copy into your own project if so desired, instead of loading it as a gem.