Re: Re: [fw-general] Zend_Filter design proposal

Hi Kevin,

Kevin McArthur wrote:
> I have successfully used Zend_Filter_Input with recursive structures
> using SPL iterator patterns. Creating a RecurisveIterator for this is
> quite simple. When I submitted the iterator patch to the old system
> (which was rejected due to this proposal being in the works) it allowed
> for treating the collection as an Iterator --- which made it easy to
> integrate with SPL recursive iterator patterns. So yes, this was sort-of
> supported.

This makes a lot of sense to me. We know that we will need something
that integrates running multiple filters and validators upon such data
types, though with respect to the current design proposal, I would
consider it highly related but perhaps out of scope. If this idea can
hold, then it gives us the opportunity to propose such functionality
separately, and I would be happy to facilitate your ideas on a design
that would be appropriate for the framework. Maybe you would like to
seed and/or write a proposal to illustrate how we could do this?

What might others be thinking?

> The idea is more of social enforcement of good coding practices --
> highly useful for team development. Direct access to post data means
> that it will probably be used and this can cause some issues that I
> thought ZFI solved.

Yes, I see your point, and we may want to continue to offer this feature
with the framework. I didn't really address this topic with my design
proposal, but I think it deserves an "official" response. The questions
to answer might be:

Do we wish to provide the ability to set $_POST to null, beyond that
users can simply write $_POST = null? We have this ability to a degree
with ZFI, when users supply $_POST to its constructor.

If we do provide this ability as a feature of a framework component,
should it be on by default? I lean toward no, since it modifies the PHP
environment by default, perhaps unexpectedly, for ZF consumers. Again,
when users supply $_POST to ZFI, by default, $_POST is set to null.

What about $_GET? There was a problem, if I recall correctly, with the
controller architecture and having set $_GET parameters to null with
ZFI... maybe it was already resolved. Matthew knows more about this than I.

I think that there must be a reasonable solution that can be reached to
meet this use case, but we obviously don't quite have it yet. I would
now leave the floor open for others to propose their ideas on how to
address this need. In the meantime, I'll do some more research and
collaboration in an effort to solve the problem.

Thanks again for your helpful feedback!

Best regards,
Darby