Association validation/update/save inconsistency

[nikolajfrey]

Hi CFWheels Team,

I recently started a job working on a team of Lucee/CFWheels developers and I've been enjoying the experience so far.

I was investigating a bug we had recently where a model's update function was failing (returning false) yet the valid function was returning true, I looked into it, mainly the wheels/model/[nestedproperties.cfm, create.cfm, validations.cfm, and update.cfm] files, and found there to be a bit of inconsistency with the way association validation is handled.

When running model.valid() it seems to only run $validateAssociations as an aside and does not really take into account the associations validity when returning the parent model's validity.

In fact $validateAssociations will always returns true.

But when updating or saving a model, the association validation is taken a little more seriously, and the return of the $saveAssociations function in create.cfm:221 is actually considered and the parent model won't save if any associations fail to save.

Now there doesn't seem to be a good way of access the generated errors of an association that I can see when validating/updating/saving the parent model, and our parent model has a grand total of 47 associations.

So I just wanted to raise a discussion around whether the current pattern is ideal or not, and if there are any established techniques for logging the errors of associations?

I know I can do for (association in model.$classData().associations) { model[association].allErrors() }

but I'm just wondering if the valid function should take the validation of associations into account in its return? And maybe if something like for (association in model.$classData().associations) { model[association].allErrors() } should be built in?

Kindly,
Nikolaj Frey

[nikolajfrey]

#1081

[neokoenig]

Thanks! Don't forget to add yourself to the Changelog

[chapmandu]

Added