JSON Validator

A JSON Validator that designed to be elegant and easy to use.

Motivation

JSON Validation is a common task in automated API testing, JSON-Schema is complex and not easy to use, so i created this library to simplify the JSON validation process and made JSON validation more elegant and fun.

Features

• JSON Schema validation, useful for automated API testing
• Custom type support, it is possible to define your custom types and reuse it everywhere
• Nullable type support
• More is coming...

Installation

You can install the latest version of JSON validator with the following command:

composer require  rethink/json-validator:dev-master 

Documentation

Types

By default, JSON Validator shipped with seven kinds of built-in types:

• integer
• double
• boolean
• string
• number
• array
• object

Besides the built-in types, it is possible to define your custom type via defineType() method.

The following code snippets shows how we can define custom types through array or callable.

1. Define a composite type

$validator->defineType('User', [
    'name' => 'string',
    'gender' => 'string',
    'age' => '?integer',
    'rating' => '?integer|boolean',
]);

This example defines a custom type named User, which have four properties. name and gender require be a string, age requires be an integer but allows to be nullable, and rating required to integer or boolean and allows to be null.

2. Define a list type

$validator->defineType('UserCollection', ['User']);

This defines UserCollection to be an array of User. In order to define a list type, the definition of the type much contains only one element.

3. Define a type in callable

$validator->defineType('timestamp', function ($value) {
    if ((!is_string($value) && !is_numeric($value)) || strtotime($value) === false) {
        return false;
    }

    $date = date_parse($value);

    return checkdate($date['month'], $date['day'], $date['year']);
});

It is also possible to define a type using a callable, which is useful to perform some validation on the data. Such as the example above defined a timestamp type, that requires the data to be a valid datetime.

Validate a Type

We can validate a type by the following two steps:

1. Create a Validator instance

use rethink\jsv\Validator;

$validator = new Validator();
// $validator->defineType(...)  Add your custom type if necessary

2. Preform the validation

$matched = $validator->matches($data, 'User');
if ($matched) {
    // Validation passed
} else {
    $errors = $validator->getErrors();
}

This example will check whether the given $data matches the type User, if validation fails, we can get the error messages through getErrors() method.

Strict Mode

In some situations, we may want an object matches our type strictly, we can utilizing strict mode to achieve this, the following is the example:

$data = [
    'name' => 'Bob',
    'gender' => 'Male',
    'age' => 19,
    'phone' => null, // This property is unnecessary
];
$matched = $validator->matches($data, 'User', true); // strict mode is turned on
var_dump($matched); // false is returned

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