[development] changes to hook_nodeapi

[Andrew Lee]

On 8/31/06, *Gerhard Killesreiter* <gerhard at 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
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