CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

First, I must say that I'm amazed by the Profiles feature. It's so useful to reflect organization needs! It’s an out of the box functionality that makes a true differentiator from the other CRM solutions.

That being said, I have a question regarding what would be the best approach to perform field validation using regular expressions. Let’s say that I want to force the users to enter the information in specific format. Ex: phone numbers with XXX-XXX-XXXX format.

In the documentation, I’ve read the part on the custom fields and I did not see mention of validation. There was also a part on the hook specification, but It wasn’t clear to me where and how to use it.

From what I understood, the way I would do it is to use the profiles and then add validation code to the code generated by CiviCRM.  But before doing this, I wanted to verify it there was an easiest way to perform field validation or if it was planned to add built-in functionalities for this purpose in the next releases of CiviCRM (if it's the case, I would be glad to contribute).

Thanks.  In the mean time, is using custom validation javascripts with the profile forms is the simpler approach?

Yes, I will choose the stand alone form for now. It's the most efficient manner.  Many Thanks for the guidance!