ValidationTextBox: display more descriptive error messages

[Scott Lewis]

Error messages should be better tailored to the problem AND built into the validator type. Look at Flex validators (​http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/componentexplorer/explorer.html) for an example of appropriate error messages.

[Adam Peller]

Please provide specific information and/or examples

[bill]

I did look under the link above, in the "Validators and Formatters" section, but upon entering an invalid value the only thing that happens is that it turns red... I don't see any error message appear at all. Did I miss something?

[Scott Lewis]

Replying to bill:

I did look under the link above, in the "Validators and Formatters" section, but upon entering an invalid value the only thing that happens is that it turns red... I don't see any error message appear at all. Did I miss something?

SL: Try email validator. Omit the @ sign. The field turns red. Hover over the field. The message is provided in an tooltip. The message is very specific ie. "The at sign (@)is missing in your email address." This tells the user exactly what is wrong.

[bill]

Ah I see, I didn't try hovering.

Yes, flex has much better messages then us, I see your point.

This would be a big change to our infrastructure (currently the code just works off of a regular expression), but I can see the value.

Let's try to do this for 1.4.

[Adam Peller]

Interesting. Well, I'd rather see us implement hints in our UI (#3286). I'm not sure error messages like the ones in Flex are always that useful. For example, for incomplete responses like:

[email protected] -> "the domain in your e-mail address is missing a period" (well, there is no host/domain. Do non-technical users know what a domain is? etc.)

bar.com -> "An at-sign (@) is missing in your e-mail address". Well, so is the username.

and so on. I guess it all depends on how complex your heuristics are. I'd rather try hinting, keep the regexp mechanism, and show "this is not a valid e-mail address, like [email protected]…" It's simple, to the point, and we know it's right.

[dylan]

Given that no one has shown interest in creating a patch in the past 5+ years, I'm closing this as patchwelcome.