I3Val Input Validation¶
Preface¶
This extension was created with the working title "Ilja's Initiative for Input Validation", and was initially sponsored by Amnesty International Vlaanderen, thus the unusual name.
Its purpose is to provide convenient tools for validating data input from external sources into CiviCRM, such as public event registration or contribution forms or APIs from third-party systems, e.g. external payment providers synchronising their data using web hooks.
Usually, feeding data into CiviCRM in an unsupervised manner requires either full confidence in the data source, so that data can be safely updated or created without validation, or data changes to be rejected. Since the CiviCRM API does not provide a convenient way to document such rejections for later manual review, this extension tries to act as a mediator between the API and the user by providing functionality for processing rejected data changes in a batch processing interface (the I3Val Desktop).
Features¶
The I3Val extension provides a user interface for manually processing data changes documented by its API, allowing the user to step through them one by one and providing options for approving or finally rejecting the requested changes or manually altering the input before saving to the CiviCRM database and closing the data change request.
You can have as many different change request configurations as you want, by attaching any amount of handlers to an activity type. You can then also decide to process only a subset by using a link like this:
https://{mydomain}/civicrm/i3val/desktop?reset=1&restart=1&types=123,124
types here refers to the configurations, i.e. the activity type IDs.
Technical background¶
The basic workflow for using this extension is to request updates to CiviCRM Core entities Contact, Address, Phone, Email, SepaMandate or others (to be implemented) using the appropriate API action. This should happen after some logic has already processed the data that can be safely updated, because the I3Val extension only documents differing changes as activities, that can be processed with a user interface later on. Information about the requested changes are being put into custom fields on the activities.
Info
An example for processing data input is the Extended Contact Manager (XCM) extension, which provides rules for adding, overwriting, or rejecting contact data, and provides an option to document differences with the I3Val extension.