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Performing Exercise on Validation Constraint Rules

<div id="content"><div class="section"><p tabindex="0">Now that you’ve been introduced to the validation framework module, you're ready to perform the validation exercise.</p><p tabindex="0">To access the exercise material and the preconfigured exercise environment, you’ll need to have an SAP Learning Hub subscription. This subscription further grants you access to the Practice System for SAP Commerce Cloud.</p><p tabindex="0">The blog post <a target="_blank" href="https://community.sap.com/t5/crm-and-cx-blogs-by-sap/hands-on-practice-systems-your-path-to-mastering-sap-commerce-cloud/ba-p/13748637">Hands-on Practice Systems: Your Path to Mastering SAP Commerce Cloud</a> contains the information you’ll need to find/book a learning system. Just remember to search for <strong>C4H34I</strong> to find the <strong>Practice System</strong> entry for this course.</p><p tabindex="0">You can access the exercise only after you book the learning system and log into it (by following the instructions in the related system setup guide).</p><p tabindex="0">Once you finish the exercise, or should you encounter any issues during the process, you can refer to the following video.</p><div class="kalturaVideoLessonWrapper"><div aria-label="This video demonstrates the Validation Framework exercise." class="kalturaVideoLessonContainer" data-testid="video" id="1_u2fzcyli"></div></div></div></div>

Validation Exercise

Expanding upon Technical Essentials of SAP Commerce Cloud

<div><div>This video is included in the eLearning for Developers:  C4H34Ie<br></div></div>

Validation Framework Exercise

Welcome to the the Validation Exercise solution walkthrough. This video assumes that you've already done the preparation step, which is basically, "do nothing" other than the installation. The whole exercise has us create new items in Backoffice. Or  you could reset your installation by executing the "ant clean_slate" target from the TrainingLabTools folder. I'll login as admin, password nimda.  Step 1 asks us to define a "Pattern Constraint". All constraints are accessed under System, Validation. but Pattern Constraints are a type of attribute-level constraint, as opposed to constraining multiple attributes within the same item, which would be a "Composed Type" constraint.  The instructions specify the following name, "EmployeeUIDValidator".  We see that we already have a pre-filled default Annotation Class that has a default value from the Constraint Type. They want us to use a Regular Expression of \w, which means, "minimum of 5 'word characters' and no maximum specified", and Regular Expression "flag" of "case insensitive". Of course, we want to leave it "enabled", and we want to specify that we're validating a Employee UID, so within Employee, if I select Employee, then it narrows the list of attributes to those only of employee. I'll type-in UID to narrow the list so I can click on the result. I'll leave "validation languages" blank, so that I don't constrain the validation to specific languages.  I'll leave the Severity as "error", and I'll leave Error message blank, because this exercise doesn't care to go into the complexities or the subtleties of an Error Message TEMPLATE. And I'll leave Constraint groups empty,  because I also don't want to mess with the default. If I leave it blank, it'll default to the "default" Constraint group, which means that it will apply everywhere,  including Backoffice and ImpEx. So, I'll click Finish. Let's refresh, because our previous search result didn't include our new addition. I'm looking at the "Needs Reloading" column, since I know that a new entity will have "true" for "Needs Reloading". There it is.   Now I need to "reload" the validation engine. I didn't actually have to refresh my view in order to do that; I just wanted to show you the value of "true" for Needs Reloading. I just click this Backoffice "action icon"  to Reload the validation engine. And now, if I refresh the search result,  we see that EmployeeUIDValidator shows "false" for Needs Reloading. So the Validation Engine now has the latest constraints / validators. And remember the terminology:  "validators" are the components in the Java domain,  whereas "constraints" are the corresponding components. Sort of, like "wrappers" in the Commerce domain.  Let's go test this constriaint.  UID is obviously "User id" for Employee. So to test EmployeeUIDValidator, let's go to User, Employees.  and take any Employee, "cxuser", for example. "cxuser" starts as 6 characters long. Now that's 5 -- that's still valid. Now that's 4.  We see that now, it is out of range. If I click on that triangle icon, it says, "The attribute, ID must match the Regular Expression \w", and so forth.  That's not a very user-friendly error message, but we're not going to go into details of how to improve them. Let's try percent sign -- this is also a violation. Asterisk would also be a violation, and so forth. Also, I want to point out that because it's an error, it shows up in red and not yellow. And, because it's an error, it also applies a "block" to the Save button. The Save button itself, is basically disabled because there is an unhandled error.  So I'll hit "close", I'll hit "refresh" to revert to the original value, and that's it for step 1.  Step 2 has us define a "Dynamic Constraint". So if you go back to System, Constraints, we want a new instance of the "ComposedType Constraint", called "Dynamic Constraint". So this is the "constriant Type". We want a new "item" of that type, so we click on that. The instructions want us to use the ID, EANFormatValidator. So EAN is one of the attributes of Product. It's an International Article Number, sort-of like a European version of an American UPC code. We see that the Annnotation Class is pre-filled. That comes from being specified, in the TYPE definition as a default value for this attribute in Dynamic Constraint. Being that this is a type-level constraint, which has access to all the attributes of a whole-item, we need to specify the "Composed Type" to validate, Product. I type-in the word, 'Product', it narrows the list down to 17 pages. The entry I'm looking for is on "page 4" of the results. "Class to Validate" would be if I want to validate stand-alone Java POJOs (Plain Ol' Java Object), or JavaBean. Because this is based on a script, we're going to choose BeanShell, which is the only choice. And Script Body; the instructions give us a script body with carriage-returns, or just out of convenience, they also give us the script body with all of the new-line characters removed, because a little quirk of Backoffice is that Script Body, while, in my opinion, it ought to be a "text area", they use a "text field". We're going to leave this constraint "enabled". If we were to actually examine the script,  we'd see that constrained value needs to be exactly 13 decimal characters, so digit characters, 0 through 9, And that the first three digits must range from 400 through 440. I'm not going to click on "Next", because we already know that we want to leave it as "error" and we don't want to bother with the "error message". Let's complete the creation process. So we see that, once again, I want to reload the Validation Engine. I'm not going to even bother refreshing the results. Ok, now when I find EANFormatValidator because I've already reloaded the validation engine, it doesn't "need reloading". So now, let's test this new constraint.  Let's go to Catalog, Products. In our case, click on any Product. If we go to the advanced editor's Extended Attributes tab,  we see that EAN shows up here. This one is 13 characters. If I type-in a 14th character, I saw the SAVE button flash over here. Now, it's not going to show-up red for this attribute, because it's not an attribute-level constraint. We have to attempt to SAVE it to see errors of type-level constraints. So we see that the default error message consists mostly of the script itself, as to "the rule the user is violating". Obviously, we could've specified a friendlier message in the "error message" attribute during creation, but the exercise did not have us do that. Let me remove that 14th digit and just change this first part and put it out of range. 400-440 is what's required. Let's put in 450, and try saving. And again, it's out of range. 399 would've been out of range. You attempt to SAVE, and you get the same error. OK, so I'm going to refresh this to reset the value, there.  And, because there have been no changes since that reset, Save, now, is greyed-out, because there's nothing to save. And that is it for Step 2.