Published 2020-05-25
This is another Joi related post and documented down when I use Joi.when().
The scenario that I always come across is
When you designing your API schema, certain field requirement are highly dependent on another field.
For example, there are 2 types of user, teacher and student. In the API schema, the employeeId only required when the userType is teacher.
{
userType: 'teacher', // Should be teacher or student
employeeId: 1 // Only available when userType is teacher
}
There are 2 types of validation we can do over here. I called it soft validation and strict validation.
We can write our schema as below if we go for soft validation.
const schema = Joi.object({
userType: Joi.string().required(),
employeeId: Joi.number().optional(),
});
In the above code, we declare the employeeId is an optional field.
However, this soft validation does not tell the API caller they're passing in the wrong information. They could still pass the employeeId even when the userType is student.
Thus, I suggest using strict validation instead.
We can write our schema as below if we go for strict validation.
const schema = Joi.object({
userType: Joi.string().valid(['student', 'teacher']).required(),
employeeId: Joi.when('userType', {
is: 'teacher',
then: Joi.number().required(),
otherwise: Joi.forbidden(),
}),
});
With the schema above, we perform a stricter validation which include:
student and teacher allowed for userType. employeeId field is forbidden when userType is student.With the strict validation approach, developers have a much clearer expectation of each field.
Thanks for reading.