Error Levels

So apart from lighting up the red lights in the user interface, how does the validation affect the content flow?

Each validator evaluates to one of the following error levels:

Unknown
Valid
Suggestion
Warning
Error
Critical Error
Fatal Error


Suggestion and Warning display colored hints in the UI but never prevent users from completing their tasks:

Error prevents the item from changing the workflow state (see part 1 of this article), but like a lot of other details, this is a default that can be changed. Error level also displays scarier red markers in the UI:

Critical Error displays a modal warning whenever an item is being saved in the Content Editor. However it's up to editor to decide if she wants to proceed:

Fatal Error displays a warning and prevents the item from being saved:

Overriding the Default Error Level

As a solution architect or administrator, it's up to you to decide the level of error each validator should return.

Crestone ships with a Url Characters validator that displays a warning if the item name will have to be encoded in the URL. However you might be taking your URLs really seriously, and you want the Url Characters validator to result in a Critial Error, to make sure that editors get an in-your-face warning and the item cannot get to the final state of the workflow.

Url Characters is an item-level validator, which means it's registered at /sitecore/system/settings/validation rules/item validators. To change the error level, add the Result=CriticalError parameter to the parameters field:

Some validators allow further configuration: maximum length validator defaults to 40 characters, but you can change that using the same parameters field.

Built-in Validators

Sitecore 6 ships with a number of item and field validators you can use:

Item validators
Broken Links – Checks the item for broken links.
Duplicate Name - Checks that the item name is unique among siblings.
Full Page XHtml – Renders the entire page and validates against local XHTML schema.
Media Size Too Big – Checks if media is too big to load in memory or store in the database.
Url Characters - Checks if an item name contains characters that must be escaped in URLs.

Field validators
Broken Links - Checks if a field contains broken links.
Is Email, Is Integer - Checks if a field contains an email address or an integer value.
Is XHtml – Validates field XHTML against a local schema.
Max Length 40 - Checks if a field contains a value of 40 or less characters (limit can be changed)
Rating 1 to 9 - Checks if a field contains a value between 1 and 9.
Required - Checks if a field contains a value.
Spellcheck - Checks spelling using the RAD Editor spell check validation, also used in the Rich Text editor.
W3C XHtml Validation - Validates the field HTML using the remote W3C validation service.

System field validators
Alt Required - Checks that the alt text is filled in on the media item.
Extension May Not Start with a Dot - Checks that the media file extension does not start with a dot.
Extern Link Target – Checks that external links open in a new window.
Image Has Alt Text - Checks the image field has alt text set.
Image Has Alt Text from Media Library - Checks if the media item has default alt text.
Image Size - Checks the size for the images referenced through image fields.
Rich Text Image Size - Checks the image dimensions for the images included in the rich text fields, i.e. if the image is too big to look good in the site design.

In part 3 I'll show how to build a validator of your own.

This post is a part of series about new validation features introduced in Sitecore 6:

Part 1: Introduction, configuration, validation types.
Part 2: Error levels, built-in validators.
Part 3: Making a custom validator.
Part 4: Making a validator fix action.