April 24, 2007

Unwanted ColdFusion form validation

I came across something strange today when developing a web form.

Basically I had a form field with a name/id of “restoration_required” but when I submitted the form I got the following error:

Form Error

Now Geoff Bowers happened to be standing nearby and was kind enough to point out that this looked like a validation error, only I wasn’t using cfform!

A quick test (on WinXP, CFMX 7.0.2) showed everything working as expected when I renamed the field as “restoration_isRequired”.

Of course what was really strange was the fact that this was happening when using a normal

tag…not .

Update 25th April 2007

In response to Todd’s last comment I did a little bit of testing, and when I create a ColdFusion will (as expected) generate an HTML form for me.

If I then add the validation attributes (for validateat=“onserver”) ColdFusion will validate any fields where I specify “required=‘true’”. In that situation I will get the same error message as before…not that I know where you’d use this because you don’t really seem to get any control over the message!

But…

Even with a if I name a field something which ends with “_required” I get that server side validation message whether I’ve entered a value or not!

<cfform name="myForm" action="" format="html" method="post">

	<cfinput type="text" name="firstName_required" id="firstName_required" required="true" validateat="onServer" />

	<cfinput type="submit" name="Submit" id="Submit" value="Send" />

</cfform>

Sample form

Submitting this gives me the following error:

Form Error 2

In my opinion that is a bug which basically means whether you’re using <cfform> or <form> you can’t name any fields ending with “_required”.