Validation Engine V2

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Prerequisites

Node v8+ is required.

Install packages

Run npm install from project root to install all necessary packages.

Development with Test UI

Run npm start or npm run start

Production and usage

The project gets built and published on the BFRP Feed and can be imported in applications as

import ValidationEngine from 'bfrp-ar-validation'

The module can be instantiated with validation configuration as below

const valEngine = new ValidationEngine(config)

How it works

The validation engine works by running submission data through logic rules, returning either a pass or a fail. The validation config specifies what data needs to be sent to the logic rules.

Triggering

The validation engine handles whether or not a validation should trigger. This is done by populating the validation config with form data before it is sent to the logic rule.

For example, a logic rule may look like:

"VAL0001S": {
    "type": "SOFT",
    "ruleId": "033_v2",
    "cellSets": [
        { "setName": "mainCells", "cells": [ "DON010" ] },
        { "setName": "otherCells", "cells": [ "DON020" ] }
    ],
    "message": "..."
}

This would get populated with field values and disabled statuses resulting in:

"VAL0001S": {
    "type": "SOFT",
    "ruleId": "033_v2",
    "cellSets": [
        { "setName": "mainCells", "cells": [ "DON010" ], data: [ 100 ], "disabledStatus": [ false ] },
        { "setName": "otherCells", "cells": [ "DON020" ], data: [ 300 ], "disabledStatus": [ false ] }
    ],
    "message": "..."
}

Above, you can see that DON010 has a value of 100, while DON020 has a value of 300.

If a field is yet to be given a value it will appear in data as undefined. When an undefined value is found within data we know that the user has not completed all of the pages needed for this validation to trigger so we do not run the logic rule.

If a field does not have value (it is undefined) but the field is disabled (perhaps on a page locked by the questionnaire responses) we replace undefined with 0 so the logic rule will run.

Field requirements

Using the field requirements config file (generated from AR Web Forms and stored at /src/config/field-requirements.json) we can use submission data to calculate whether or not a field is disabled. For example, if DON010 was only enabled if QUE010 is set to true we can set its disabled status based on the data in QUE010.

Triggering workflow

Cell set config

Within a cell set there are additional configuration values that can give different behaviours to the triggering:

1. allAcademyData when getting cell set data at academy level, data will be retrieved for all academies regardless of whether an instance was supplied when this is set to true
2. noTrigger data will be retrieved for this cell set however the validation will not trigger for these cells if this is set to true
3. zeroIfFieldMissing missing fields within this cell set will be given a value of 0 regardless of field disabled status if this is set to true

Cell sets methods

Before we send the populated validation config to the logic rule the validation engine adds methods to the cell sets to make it easy for the logic rules to make calculations. For example, from inside a logic rule we can call config.cellSets.sumOf('mainCells') which would return a sum of all the field values within main cells. The available methods are:

1. cellsIn(cellSetName) returns list of cells (field ids) in a specified cell set
2. getPropertyValue return a property value of a specified cell set
3. hasValue retrun true if cell set has that set name item
4. sumOf(cellSetName) returns a sum of the values held within a specified cell set
5. valueOf(cellSetName, cellSetItemLocation) returns the value held within a specified cell set and location (first location is default)
6. valuesIn(cellSetName) returns list of values held within a specified cell set

LogicResult

Each logic rule returns a LogicResult object. The values for this object are as follows:

result - true/false value for overall pass/fail of the validation (required)

missingDataIdentified - no longer needed as missing data will be caught by triggering, not the logic rule (optional)

failedCells - a list of field ids to apply the error to. Used if not all cells fail and we only want to show errors on failed cells (optional)

academies - used to return academy level result(s) (pass/fail) so academy validation errors can work independantly from each other (optional)

dynamicRows - used to return result(s) (pass/fail) at dynamic row level so validation errors can target specific rows on dynamic lists (optional)