Enforce validation on drafts?

Tinouti

8 months ago

9

versions: {
  drafts: true,
  skipDraftsValidation: false, // defaults to `true`
}

• 

  dribbens

  Payload Team

  8 months ago

  You could add a UI field in the top of the sidebar that shows the validation status even for drafts. That could be useful to your editing experience.

  
  
  

  Is there any other side effect to adding validation on drafts that I'm not thinking about? 🤔
  

  
  

  The reason we don't validate when saving drafts is purely a UX decision. When working on a document, you may just want to save your progress and ignore required fields and other validation rules that impede you from doing so.

  
  

  There will be more work going into publishing workflows in the future which could mean that there are additional statuses or these become more extensible. Currently there is only status: 'draft' | 'published'. It would be nice to have customized control over the status to add review steps or scheduled for publish and whatnot. For those in-between steps, validation would be necessary.

  
  
  

  You have my brain-wheels turning, so far we left versions pretty open ended, but I think some more fine-tuning and customization of the versions is needed.

• 

  Tinouti

  8 months ago

  The reason we don't validate when saving drafts is purely a UX decision. When working on a document, you may just want to save your progress and ignore required fields and other validation rules that impede you from doing so.
  

  
  

  Yup that makes total sense, and I would rather keep it that way as well if possible. And especially once you add the "autosave" feature into the mix, not validating content basically goes from "nice-to-have" to "mandatory".

  
  
  

  There will be more work going into publishing workflows in the future which could mean that there are additional statuses or these become more extensible. Currently there is only status: 'draft' | 'published'. It would be nice to have customized control over the status to add review steps or scheduled for publish and whatnot.
  

  
  

  That's exactly what I'm looking for ( 🙌 ) and trying to work around in the meantime.

  
  
  

  For context, we need to translate all of our content through a third party system and professional translators. This needs to happen

  ahead of "publish"

  (we don't want any non-translated content to be live, and need to be able to edit and translated already live content), but we also want to make sure the content we're sending for translation

  is valid

  (going through several days of paid translation only to come back, hit "Publish", and realize some content is invalid would be pretty bad).

  
  

  
  

  This leaves me with two options for now (as far as I can see):

  
  

  1. Validate content somehow ahead of "publish", either by

  
  

  a. Forcing validation on draft save

  
  

  b. Manually trigger the validation without relying on the "save" or "publish" buttons

  
  

  2. or don't rely on the "publish" system to actually publish content in the front end but add a new "isLive" field or something to control this instead

  
  
  

  I'd really rather not do 2. as there's a lot of nice QoL stuff that's built in with the draft system and how published docs behave and all that that I'd rather not lose or have to rebuild. Which leaves me with 1a or 1b while we wait for that future work on publishing workflow. 😄

  
  

  
  

  You could add a UI field in the top of the sidebar that shows the validation status even for drafts.
  

  
  

  It sounds like this would basically be 1b, right? Do you have any thoughts or pointers on where I should start looking for implementing something like this (ie: manually triggering the validation)? 👀

  
  

  
  

  Oh, while doing something totally unrelated, I came across the

  useForm

  hook and its

  validateForm

  function!

  
  

  This is great and allows me to check whether the content is valid or not, but this doesn't give me or the user any info as to where the errors are.

  
  
  

  I'll continue to investigate, but if anyone knows how to display the same error-handling UI than when using the "Publish" button (cf screenshot), I'd be very grateful! 🙏

  
• 

  Kyr

  8 months ago

  The main issue you will run into here is that the concept of a "draft" is that it is unfinished and can be picked up again later.

  
  
  

  By enforcing validation you are forcing the user to finish the content item completely before they can save the draft, in which case they might as well just publish it.

• 

  Tinouti

  8 months ago

  I mean, yes and no. Like I mentioned previously, I do agree that the decision to not have validation on drafts is overall a good one, but in my case, I need to enforce validation

  ahead

  of publishing.

  
  

  It doesn't have to be on draft save (and ideally it wouldn't be), but given that the "publish" state is what define whether content should be publicly available or not, I can't rely on this to validate the content (cf full context here:

  https://discord.com/channels/967097582721572934/1087474509340229683/1089989046530482207

  ). 🤷‍♂️