Sparse - Errors

There are three kinds of errors printed out in Sparse. Not only can you configure what they look like, you can also configure where they go! You can do this via three separate tags.

Messages

The message is the big message like "Updated rows!", "There was an error in inserting one or more rows.", etc. You can place it by using the sqlmessage tag. Wherever that tag goes is where the message goes. If there is no sqlmessage tag, by default it will be placed at the very top of the page inside <H2> tags.

Row Errors

Hopefully you'll never see this one; it happens when there's an actual SQL error in inserting/updating data. This might be because you misspelled the name of a field, or the user tried to insert a string into an integer field, etc. There's always the possibility that Sparse messed up, of course, so if you see an error you shouldn't, please report it.

You can place this error using the sqlrowerror tag. By default it will not appear at all (instead, the Message will give a general "failed to insert one or more rows") so look sharp!

Field Errors

The most useful of the errors is what happens when a field is given the wrong value (e.g. left blank even though the required attribute is set, or the constraints attribute evaluated to false). By default the message will be inserted just before the offending sqlfield tag, followed by a <BR />.

Because every field has an associated message, sqlerror is the only tag which takes another attribute: the name of the field it's associated with. This name must be the returned name of the field; if you used an alias and called your field "e.name AS ename", your sqlerror's name must be "ename".

Styling Your Errors

By default every error has its own CSS style. You can change the class or style to whatever you want by setting the class or style attributes of the tag.

In addition, every error tag has two more attributes: startMarkup and endMarkup. The point of these is simple: generally, if the error does appear, you'll want it to be preceded or followed by some code (such as a <tr></tr>), but not if it doesn't appear. These attributes allow you to define HTML code which should be printed only if the error is printed. Note that the following example is not proper XHTML markup, but by the time it's printed it will be. 8-)

<sqlerror name="employees.name" startMarkup="<tr><td
colspan='5'>" endMarkup="</td></tr>" />

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