Understanding "Safe" Validation Rules

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Revision #5 was created by Lensi Lensi on May 16, 2011, 9:03:56 AM.

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Though it may seem obvious to accept all the fields built into a form, during the controller's action (where Massive Assignment is taking place), Yii has no way of knowing which actual fields were part of a the form. and which are from a bad guy who is **synthesizing* form input with a contrived POST in order to fool the application.

This is protecting against two scenarios:

1. Some models have attributes that are legitimate (in general), but not in a specific form. For instance, a change-your-password form for a user should accept the `password` and `passwordRepeat` attributes, but not the `isAdmin` attribute that makes him an administrator of the application. For a changePassword scenario, isAdmin should be marked expilicitly `'unsafe'`.

2. All model objects based on [CActiveRecord] have internal housekeeping attributes that are subject to shenanigans if the bad guy were able to make assignments to them. Some of these include:

* `$model->isnewrecord`
* `$model->dbcriteria`
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