Versatile form validation using jSRML

Abstract

Over the years the Internet has spread to most areas of our lives ranging from reading news, ordering food, streaming music, playing games all the way to handling our finances online. With this rapid expansion came an increased need to ensure that the data being transmitted is valid. Validity is important not just to avoid data corruption but also to prevent possible security breaches. Whenever a user wants to interact with a website where information needs to be shared they usually fill out forms and submit them for server-side processing. Web forms are very prone to input errors, external exploits like SQL injection attacks, automated bot submissions and several other security circumvention attempts. We will demonstrate our jSRML metalanguage which provides a way to define more comprehensive and non-obtrusive validation rules for forms. We used jQuery to allow asynchronous AJAX validation without posting the page to provide a seamless experience for the user. Our approach also allows rules to be defined to correct mistakes in user input aside from performing validation making it a valuable asset in the space of form validation. We have created a system called jSRMLTool which can perform hybrid validation methods as well as propose jSRML validation rules using machine learning.