Stand-alone usage of Zend-InputFilter

Any data that you receive needs to be checked and validated. There are number of ways to do this including PHP’s filter_var, but I prefer Zend-InputFilter. This is how to use it as a stand-alone component.

Installation

Firstly, we install it using Composer:

$ composer require zendframework/zend-inputfilter
$ composer require zendframework/zend-servicemanager

You don’t have to have ServiceManager, but it makes working with InputFilter much easier, so it’s worth installing.

Create the InputFilter

The easiest way to create an InputFilter is to use the provided Factory class. Let’s consider an Author entity that has the properties: author_id, name, biography & date_of_birth. We can create an input filter like this:

use Zend\InputFilter\Factory as InputFilterFactory;

class Author
{
    protected $author_id;
    protected $name;
    protected $biography;
    protected $date_of_birth;

    // ...

    protected function createInputFilter()
    {
        $factory = new InputFilterFactory();
        $inputFilter = $factory->createInputFilter([
            'author_id' => [
                'required' => true,
                'validators' => [
                    ['name' => 'Uuid'],
                ],
            ],
            'name' => [
                'required' => true,
                'filters' => [
                    ['name' => 'StringTrim'],
                    ['name' => 'StripTags'],
                ],
            ],
            'biography' => [
                'required' => false,
                'filters' => [
                    ['name' => 'StringTrim'],
                    ['name' => 'StripTags'],
                ],
            ],
            'date_of_birth' => [
                'required' => false,
                'validators' => [
                    ['name' => 'Date'],
                    [
                        'name' => 'LessThan',
                        'options' => [
                            'max' => date('Y-m-d'),
                            'inclusive' => true,
                        ],
                    ],
                ],
            ],
        ]);

        return $inputFilter;
    }
}

The createInputFilter() method takes an associative array where the key is the name of the input and then the value is a specification. There are a number of elements in the specification, but we usually just specify required, filters and validators.

This particular input filter requires that author_id and name are present, but that biography and date_of_birth are optional. The author_id must be a UUID, the name & biography must not have leading or trailing whitespace or no HTML tags and the date_of_birth, if present, must be a valid date in the past.

Using the InputFilter

To use the InputFilter, we set the data and then call isValid(). This can be done in a validate() method that looks like this:

Use Crell\ApiProblem\ApiProblem;
use Error\Exception\ProblemException;

Class Author
{
    // ...

    /**
     * Create an author
     *
     * @param  array $data
     * @return Author
     * @throws ProblemException
     */
    public static function createAuthor($data)
    {
        $inputFilter = $this->createInputFilter();
        $inputFilter->setData($data);

        if ($inputFilter->isValid()) {
            return new Author($inputFilter->getValues());
        }

        $problem = new ApiProblem('Validation failed');
        $problem->setStatus(400);
        $problem['errors'] = $inputFilter->getMessages();

        throw new ProblemException($problem);
    }
}

In this case, it’s an API, so the data has come from a PUT or POST request. We call setData() to pass the array of data into the InputFilter and then call isValid(). If the data is valid, we can return a newly instantiated Author object that is constructed with the filter data. If the validation fails, then we throw a ProblemException which needs an ApiProblem instance, so we create one for it.

To find out which validators failed, getMessages() provides a nested array which is very useful for passing back to the API client.

As an example, this is what failure looks like:

$ curl -i -X "POST" "http://localhost:8888/authors" \
     -H "Accept: application/json" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d $'{ "name": "", "author_id": "1234" }'

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Host: localhost:8888
Connection: close
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.0.14
Content-type: application/problem+json

{
    "errors": {
        "author_id": {
            "valueNotUuid": "Invalid UUID format"
        },
        "name": {
            "isEmpty": "Value is required and can't be empty"
        }
    },
    "title": "Validation failed",
    "type": "about:blank",
    "status": 400
}

Fin

That’s all there is to it. Zend-InputFilter is a very flexible data filter and validator and works really well for APIs, such as those written in Slim.