True, but validating, or what used to be called "laundering your input", still has to be done. Whether it's in the gatekeeper or the business object, the code has to be there.
But that’s really no way to write long-lived software, is it?Yes, it's fine actually. Who cares where the error message "producttype '4' not allowed" comes from. All that matters is that at any instant in time it either processes valid messages or returns a suitable error message.
If splitting validation code from the business logic represents a maintainability problem, then consider code generation. Frameworks like StringTemplate make code generation easy. CodeGen tackles the common problem that a feature requires changes up and down the software stack. The traditional way to do this was manually make all the changes and rely on comments and checklists to ensure all the required changes are done. With CodeGen you can use a more literate programming style. Define in one place, generate various bits of code, and inject it into the appropriate places in your code. Patterns such as Chain Of Responsibility help.
1 comment:
I agree that code generation is a good way to make input validation maintainable. You would declare the constraints on an input and the generator would take care of the rest. Much like in SQL.
StringTemplate is just the last stage in code generation - the actual writing of the code.
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