Thursday, September 14, 2017

New Version of vadacl Released as an NPM Package

It's been a LONG time since my last blog post.  Work and life simply kept me from doing a lot of personal coding.  But I'm making an effort to get back into the swing of things, and I decided to start that effort by moving forward with my vadacl Angular validation library.

For anyone not familiar with what vadacl is about, here's the current synopsis:

vadacl is a library that extends and enhances reactive form validation in Angular 4.x. It provides:

  • A mechanism for declaring validation logic within domain classes / data objects that can be reused in multiple components.
  • The ability to configure the text of validation failure messages as part of the domain class validation logic or within a global validation message object.
  • Helper methods for triggering validation and displaying validation results.
  • Additional validation methods beyond those provided by Angular 4.x, and the ability to extend the vadacl validation methods with custom methods in your project.
  • The new version of vadacl (currently version 1.0.10) is available as an NPM package at:

    https://www.npmjs.com/package/vadacl

    There is also a separate GitHub repo containing an Angular CLI-powered Angular 4.x app that demonstrates the use of vadacl in different scenarios:

    https://github.com/bcswartz/vadacl-demo

    As part of the transition to an NPM package, vadacl was refactored to allow you to extend or override the validation methods and messages without touching the library files themselves, using files specific to your project.  That will let you update to future versions of vadacl via npm without losing any of your custom code.  The new version was written for Angular 4.x and includes vadacl versions of the newest methods in Angular's Validators class:  min, max, and email.

    The new demonstration application is an updated version of the one still hosted on the old vadacl GitHub repo, and contains not only examples of the new validation methods, but also provides documentation about how to go about extending vadacl and an example of how you can swap out the global messages file with a different one (designed for a different audience or different language) during your build/deployment process.