Incremental Form Validation Example

Richard Frainier · April 21st, 2006, 08:01 PM

Just starting to use XMLHttp-style Ajax.
I have also just started using PHP.
I tried the Incremental Form Validation Example (downloaded the code from Wrox).
The E-mail and Username fields validate OK (and display errors when appropriate).
The Birthday field does not validate correctly. Whatever garbage I type in is just accepted.
Environment is WindowsXP/IE6.0/IIS5.0/PHP5.1(ISAPI).
Ideas?

Also - what is a recommended debugger for Ajax/PHP/IIS development?

nzakas · April 22nd, 2006, 02:37 PM

Sorry, there is no way to tell from your description what the problem could be. I'd suggest looking at the PHP page, which was designed for PHP 4. See what the output of this section is:

Code:

        $date = strtotime($_GET["txtBirthday"]);
        if ($date < 0) {
            $message = "This is not a valid date.";
        } else {
            $valid = "true";
            $message = "";
        }

Nicholas C. Zakas
Author, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (ISBN 0764579088)
http://www.nczonline.net/

Richard Frainier · April 22nd, 2006, 03:58 PM

> designed for PHP 4
Aha!
In <http://www.php.net/strtotime> it says that strtotime returns a timestamp on success, FALSE otherwise. Previous to PHP 5.1.0, this function would return -1 on failure.

So I changed
if ($date < 0)
to
if ($date === false)
and all is well.