.validate()

Verify that a value would be valid for a given attribute, then return it, loosely coerced.

Something.validate(attrName, value);

This validates (and potentially coerces) the provided data as if it was one of the values passed into .update(). You might think about it like a "dry run".

Usage

Example

Check the given string and return a normalized version.

Note that if normalization is not possible, this throws an error. Be careful: You must manually handle any error thrown from within an asynchronous callback.

User.validate('emailAddress', req.param('email'));
User.validate('password', req.param('password'));

Negotiating errors

The .validate() method can throw any of the usage errors you might see when calling .update(). For example:

try {
  var normalizedBalance = BankAccount.validate('balance', '$349.86');
} catch (err) {
  switch (err.code) {
    case 'E_VALIDATION':
      // => '[Error: Invalid `bankAccount`]'
      _.each(e.all, function(woe){
        sails.log(woe.attrName+': '+woe.message);
      });
      break;
    default:
      throw err;
  }
}

Notes

• This is a synchronous method, so you don't need to use await, promise chaining, or traditional Node callbacks.
• .validate() is exposed as a separate method for convenience. You can always simply call .create() or .update(), instead of calling .validate() first, since those model methods apply the same checks automatically.
• .validate() is useful when implementing use cases where it is beneficial or more aesthetically pleasing (/DRY) to reuse your model validations for other purposes. For example, you might want to validate some untrusted data before communicating with a 3rd party API like Mailgun or Stripe, or you might just want to run certain model validations initially to make some code easier to reason about.
• .validate() does not communicate with the database, and thus it only detects logical failures such as type safety errors and high-level validation rule violations. It cannot detect problems with physical-layer constraints like uniqueness, since those constraints are checked by the underlying database, not by Sails or Waterline.