[Zope3-dev] Re: __repr__ of ValidationErrors in zope.schema

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Christian Zagrodnick wrote:
> I'm implementing the getValidationErrors thingy right now and once again 
> stumbled upon the ValidationErrors. Their __repr__ is all but useful.
> 
> For instance "TooSmall":
> 
>>>> TooSmall(8, 10)
> 8 10
> 
> Another sort of related issue is that you only get the __doc__ string 
> when calling the .doc() method. "Value is too small." doesn't help a lot.
> 
> Something like "The value 8 is too small. At least 10 is required." 
> would be much more informative.
> 
> What should we do about this?

I'd say, fix it :). You seem to have a pretty good understanding of how 
this should be fixed already.

Note that a ValidationError's docstring is used for the error message in 
forms. A change will therefore likely cause functional tests to break, 
both within Zope and especially in 3rd party packages. I think this is 
an acceptable risk to take as long as we're *improving* the error 
messages (which is hard to do w/o breaking some ftests).

-- 
http://worldcookery.com -- Professional Zope documentation and training