How to programmatically validate nodes for duplicate values [#643972]

Hello,

I am programmatically creating nodes, with this piece of code


	.....
		$node = node_submit($node);
		if ($node->validated)
			{
			node_save($node);
			echo 'Node: ' . $node->title . '(' . $node->nid . ') was  saved. <br />';
			}
		else 
			{
			echo 'Node: ' . $node->title . '(' . $node->nid . ') was not saved. <br />';
			}
...

Duplicate nodes are saved without a problem, even though I have Unique field installed. Once I go to edit a node like this in the browser, it does show that uniquness check failed and does not let save.

Comments

Comment #1

arithmetric commented 27 November 2009 at 17:10

Title:	programmatic validation does not seem to work	» How to programmatically validate nodes for duplicate values
Component:	User interface	» Documentation
Status:	Active	» Closed (works as designed)

Hi giorgio79,

The node_submit() function does not validate the node. As you can see from the node_submit() code, $node->validated is always set to TRUE:
http://api.drupal.org/api/function/node_submit/6

Instead, to validate a node you should use node_validate(). This will run the node's values through Unique Field's validation routine, as well as the node validation rules of Drupal core and any other modules. If validation fails, then a form error is set, which you can detect using form_get_errors().

If you want only the results from Unique Field's validation, then you could use module_invoke() to run only Unique Field's hook_nodeapi routine, and again check for errors using form_get_errors().

Hope that helps. Let me know if there is any trouble using this approach.