Need validators that aren't attached to a form field

[Simon Willison]

In implementing CSRF protection (#510) I needed to add a validator to the validation chain that wasn't tied to a specific field within the manipulator. This isn't currently possible. If implemented, it would also make validation rules that depend on more than one field a lot more elegant. In fact, it would let us ditch the requirement to pass all_data to validation functions.

I think Ian Bicking's ​FunFormKit takes this approach.

(Personally I'd like to replace Manipulators with a more general purpose idea of Validators - collections of validation rules. At the moment Manipulators are coupled to models, but there are situations where you would want to validate a form that doesn't directly relate to a model. Validation in Rails has exactly the same problem.)

[Adrian Holovaty]

Correction: Manipulators are not coupled to models. It so happens that Django automatically generates manipulators *for every model*, but there's nothing about the concept of manipulators that is tied to models. Basically a manipulator is a class that encapsulates validation rules. See the manipulators in ​http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/contrib/comments/views/comments.py for examples.

I agree, though, that there should be a way to add generic validators that aren't tied to a specific field.

[Simon Willison]

I thoght they were coupled because of the presence of the save() method - maybe it should be renamed to something clearer, such as on_successful_submit().

[Michael Radziej <mir@…>]

Looks like this isn't an issue anymore. If it is, please reopen.