Would Like Feedback on Form_Validation Tweak

[eluser]volition23[/eluser]
Hello -- I just recently discovered that I could share code among several different applications using the /third_party directory. Along that line, I wanted to share callback functions for validating common elements across applications (such as a phone number) so that I wouldn't have to copy the same functions from one Controller to another across apps. So I have the following file in my /third_party directory:

/some.application/third_party/shared/helpers/phone_number_helper.php

I found that once I removed the validation callbacks from my Controller and instead tried to load them from the above helper, nothing happened. Not even an error was thrown. So I dug into the CodeIgniter Form_validation library to see what was going on. I found the reason for this behavior in the _execute() function:

if (!method_exists($this->CI, $rule))
{
continue;
}

When the callbacks are defined in the Controller, they are considered to be members of $this->CI. However if they're defined in some other file, they aren't. So I changed the above check to this:

if(method_exists($this->CI, $rule))
{
$result = $this->CI->$rule($postdata, $param);
}
elseif(function_exists($rule))
{
$result = $rule($postdata, $param);
}
else
continue;

I'm just curious if anyone who is more familiar with the guts of the framework than I sees any problems with this. Thanks.

[eluser]Aken[/eluser]
Personally, if I want a custom rule that I want to share throughout an application, I will extend the Form_validation library and just add a method to it. Then call it like any other included rule (without the "callback_" prefix).

I can't think of anything specific that might be detrimental from doing what you're doing, aside from possibly making it more difficult to upgrade to future versions of CodeIgniter.

[eluser]volition23[/eluser]
Aken -- Thank you very much for your advice, which I adopted. Should you care to see the next issue I encountered with loading my extended Form_validation library from the third_party folder, read the following:

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/210284/

Thanks again.