On 8/31/06, Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard@killesreiter.de> wrote:

> Unless it is for development purposes, I cannot imagine why my
> programmatically created nodes shouldn't be validated as any other nodes.

I'll give you one of many examples I have. Every morning a web based application I created and manage imports a large fixed length flat file from a legacy mainframe system. The mainframe app that generates this data is fed by people typing into un-validated form fields on terminals. My application needs to know about this data as soon as it shows up because it tracks a variety of metrics that are date sensitive. The data import routines clean up "nodes" as they come in externally and try to intelligently correct them for a variety of missing or incomplete elements. There is a level at which an imported "node" will be discarded because it just lacks too much information. The data is then inserted into the web app. For the most part this data would pass through the, now irrelevant, form validation routine. But not always, we let data in from the import that is missing elements that a user would be required to enter if they were typing data into the web app directly. We force users to enter this info, but can't force it from the mainframe. But, we can't throw this node out because we need to track it and know that the next day the missing info will most likely be included in the export file. In our application the data object are completely separate from the form elements, and in many cases we have multiple forms that talk to a data object with different validation rules.

This is, admittedly, an obscure example. But there are countless scenarios like this. This particular app is not built in Drupal, but I would like to think that it could be.

> Please stop right here. Read http://buytaert.net/the-pain-before-the-payoff

Yes, I have ready this and I agree with it in the context of 4.6-4.7. That said, if we keep radically changing the Drupal API for every release without serious considerations for backwards compatibility there will never be a pay-off, only pain. Your community will start dreaming of Plone or Rails. Think of it like this, when PHP 5 came out with all the enhancements to object oriented programming, they didn't eliminate people ability to program in a top down fashion. That would certainly have been unnecessary and broken Drupal. Ok, I won't go any further with this on this thread is it is off topic.

-Andrew