Display Validation errors next to each field

[arunrajv]

I've been wanting to do this myself, but had given it a lower priority.

Here is a way (hack) that I can think of. Note that this is only an outline.

1. In your error messages that you pass to the rules, prepend the field name followed by a colon. For example, if you have a field named 'email', your rule would be 'required, email, email: An email field is mandatory'.

2. Collect your error messages into $raw_errors (say). This will contain the field names. E.g.,

Code:

$raw_errors = validate_fields($_POST, $rules);

3. Process the raw errors to an error_hash. This will have a lookup of field names (which you can retrieve from the error messages) to the corresponding messages that are stripped off the field names. E.g.,

Code:

$error_hash = process_raw_errors($raw_errors);

4. Near your fields, you can dump the errors through a generic function. E.g.,

Code:

<?php
    display_errors($error_hash, "email");
?>
<input type="text" name="email" />

This should work. You can also choose to skip the process_raw_errors(.) and instead iterate through the raw errors directly in your display_errors function.

---

Just looked at the code. Here is a possibility, but maybe Ben can confirm: if you're willing to edit validation.php, look at the lines that look like the following in validate_fields(.):

Code:

if (!isset($fields[$field_name]) || $fields[$field_name] == "")
          $errors[] = $error_message;

and replace them with

Code:

if (!isset($fields[$field_name]) || $fields[$field_name] == "")
            add_error($errors, $field_name, $error_message);

where add_error will add the error to the errors hash such that it is a lookup between field names and their error arrays.

Regards,
Arun