I think we want a sort of 'if I try to create a page named like this, would it be ok?' call, sorta like a pre-flight check before you actually go issue your edit or upload. :)

This can then cover:

• basic title validity
• upload filename checks
• TitleBlacklist title checks
• possibly a subset of AbuseFilter rules?

and this could return you a fairly sensible error message, possibly a nice localized one (so we can give sane output about custom blacklist rules for instance, rather than a generic message).

Ideally it's kept as generic as possible (and probably core api), and "emulate" it going through all possible validation methods as much as we possibly can...

neilk wrote:

I agree a generic preflight check thing would be nice, but TitleBlacklist is a good place to start.

One could make an omnibus method that looked for common extensions like TitleBlacklist and AbuseFilter, but If you're going to do this generically you need to directly invoke the hooks associated with page creation (instead of waiting for page creation to call those hooks). But it's not easy to tease apart which might be simple checks for titles and which might have side effects.

ibaker wrote:

Yeah, invoking page creation hooks without creating a page sounds clever, but also fragile. Like, if it works now, there's no guarantee that a future extension won't break it by using those hooks to invoke DML.

I'd be into the notion of making a generic API that, if existing validation classes are present, will call them all and aggregate the results. It would require new code for each validation extension, but it'd allow us to at least centralize that, rather than having each new consumer of the data implement all of them separately.

At the moment, though, I think I'm going to build a TitleBlacklist API. We can move that very same code into a more generic API when/if we need to add support for a second validation extension.

Having a hook, or some relevant global, would allow things to be able to grab into the validation logic, rather than into our somewhat convoluted methods that end up into the extensions as is.

Something to look at later definitely

ibaker wrote:

API built and deployed. We'll hopefully start using it this week.