Validators

Jahia supports value constraints, which can be defined in the standard CND (Compact Namespace and Node Type Definition) file. Built-in property editors will not allow saving values if they are violating these constraints and will guide the authors by showing them how to make valid input.

JCR definitions provide the ability to mark mandatory fields, value ranges and to add regex constraints.

Mandatory constraint

<mandatory> is one of the predefined attributes, which can be set on a property definition as in the example below:

[cnt :dog]
	- breed (string) mandatory

Range constraint

For numeric and date properties, the value constraint denoted by "<" (less than) specify a valid range, which looks like: '[min, max]', '(min, max)', '(min, max]' or '[min, max)'.

[ ... means including the following min value itself

( ... means excluding the following min value itself

] ... means including the max value itself

) ... means excluding the max value itself

For long and double property types min and max are numbers. For the date property type min and max must be date strings must be in the ISO 8601:2000-compliant format: sYYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssTZD

min or max can also be left empty, which means that there is no bound in that direction.

Like with the regular expression constraint Jahia supports only one range setting per property.

Examples

From 0 inclusive to five inclusive: [0,5]

From 0 inclusive to five exclusive: [0,5)

From no minimum to fire inclusive: [,5] or (,5]

Regular expression constraint

Jahia definitions also offer the possibility to add regex constraints

For example, the following field is mandatory and must only contain letters :

[cnt:dog] >jnt:content
- breed (string) mandatory < '[a-zA-Z]*'

Value constraints are denoted by a "<" (less than) and should (albeit can) be single quoted '...'. A single quote within the regular expression needs to be escaped with a backslash: \

The JCR specification says that multiple constraints can be specified delimited with comma, but when using regular expression Jahia only supports setting a single regular expression.

As the syntax of regular expression can be very complex and not understood by the majority of authors, Jahia allows to specify a custom validation error message, which will be shown to the authors, if the entered content does not match the regular expression. You can set this message in the module's resource bundle, which defines the corresponding nodetype.

The key of the message in the resource bundle must be <nodeTypeName>.<propertyName>.constraint.error.message where colons need to be replaced with underscores. For the above example the resource bundle entry would be:

cnt_dog.breed.constraint.error.message=The input value must only contain letters.