INTERACTIVE WEB SERVICES WITH JAVA

Validating with Automata

A simple e-mail address can be specified by the regular expression:

[a-z0-9]+\@[a-z0-9]+(\.[a-z0-9]+)+

This can be translated into an automaton and used to generate validation in the browser:

The status icons mean:

     the text is a legal string
     the text is a proper prefix of a legal string
     every extension of the text is an illegal string

The XHTML document looks like this:

<form> <input type="text" name="email" size="30"/> <p/> <input type="submit" name="test" value="Submit"/> </form>

<form> <input type="text" name="email" size="30"/> <p/> <input type="submit" name="test" value="Submit"/> </form>

and the validation is specified as follows:

<powerforms> <constraint field="email"> <regexp pattern="[a-z0-9]+\@[a-z0-9]+(\.[a-z0-9]+)+"/> </constraint> </powerforms>