unique-attributes-validator

Validate unique constraints with more then one attribute

Yii comes with bucket of validators including a unique validator which validates whether an attribute value is unique in the corresponding database table. But what if your database unique constraint contains more than one attribute?

I have seen a couple Yii extensions which solve the problem but none of them are using the built-in CUniqueValidator parts. There are two ways to solve the validation problem, the first one is to add some criteria to the unique validator:

public function rules() {
    return array(
        array('firstKey', 'unique', 'criteria'=>array(
            'condition'=>'`secondKey`=:secondKey',
            'params'=>array(
                ':secondKey'=>$this->secondKey
            )
        )),
    );
}

That will do the trick, however it can get a bit cleaner. The UniqueAttributesValidator does this for you:

public function rules() {
    return array(
        array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator', 'with'=>'secondKey'),
    );
}

The UniqueAttributesValidator uses parts of CUniqueValidator and extends it by adding certain criteria. It also works for unique constraints with N attributes:

public function rules() {
    return array(
        array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator',
                      'with'=>'secondKey,thirdKey,...'),
    );
}

Requirements ¶

Yii 1.0 or above

Usage ¶

public function rules() {
    return array(
        array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator',
                      'with'=>'secondKey,thirdKey,...'),
    );
}

Resources ¶

Blog post on yiihaa.com

Total 4 comments

#7002

Tijnos at 2012/02/18 12:39pm

RE: little bit problem

Ah indeed, a bug in the documentation! It should be array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator', 'with'=>'secondKey'), And for more attributes you can comma-seperate them: array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator', 'with'=>'secondKey,thridKey,...'), I will update the documentation.

To override the default error message you can set the 'message' property, the extension will pass that to the CUniqueValidator

#6999

peterjkambey at 2012/02/18 12:03pm

little bit problem

wonderful,

i have been waiting this extension.. but seem not work when I use:

array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator', 'with'=>array('secondKey')),

the error said like this

explode() expects parameter 2 to be string, array given ..

error on line 17: $with = explode(",", $this->with);

but it work when I use this

array('firstKey', 'UniqueAttributesValidator', 'with'=>'secondKey'),

:-D ...

Probably, you may add ErrorMessage on this extension, so it will override the default error message that come only for firstKey..

But overall, this is a good extension.. Thank you..

#6994

Tijnos at 2012/02/17 10:21am

RE: nice ， very useful

Thank you for the appreciation.

Good point intergrate this into CUniqueValidator. In that case the mapping of 'unique'=>'CUniqueValidator' should be 'unique'=>'UniqueValidator'. Do you have a suggestion how to achieve this in the configuration file?

A solution would be to put CUniqueValidator::$builtInValidators['unique']='UniqueValidator'; somewhere in the beginning of the request, but in that case CValidator will be loaded every request instead of lazy-loaded.

#6987

yiqing95 at 2012/02/17 07:01am

nice ， very useful

thanks for sharing ！actually i seldom met the composite unique constraint . but your work is helpful and give a good example for using 'unique' validator of yiis on this situation . and your extension is also save us a lot of time .

by the way , it seems better to integrate this functionality to the core CUniqueValidator , just add another attribute : 'with' .

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unique-attributes-validator

Requirements ¶

Usage ¶

Resources ¶

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