What is the best way to display an error message thrown from an Autoform MeteorMethod Call

Question

I have a quick form like so:

{{> quickForm schema=competitorSchema id="newCompetitorForm" type="method" buttonContent="Save Competitor" meteormethod="insertCompetitor" tid=tournament._id }}

This is in a modal popup BTW.

Now in the method code I had a defect and did not specify one of the required fields in the mongo insert operation so what happened was:

1. Client side validation passed (cause I had populated all the required field in the form)
2. When the actual insert occurred collection2 threw the proper error saying field X was missing.

This was thrown back to me and I catch this in my onError: auto form hook like so:

onError: function(operation, error, template) {
    if(error){
        alert(error);
    }
}

This could any general error - for any reason BTW.

Alert is not what I want to use here... cause it's not very nice. Collection2 throws "Error: X is required" but I don't really want to parse out the string field name since that's sorta brittle trying to match that with a form key since it seems like X is actually the label.

I can come up with a bunch of work arounds like populating a special div or popping a modal etc but what I really want is for auto form to handle this for me with a generic form level validation error (not a specific key).

Does anyone know if there a nice way built into auto form to display a form level (not field specific error) to the user? I did not see this in the docs.

I see how I can use addInvalidKeys etc for a specific field but what I want to do is use something like addInvalidKeys with no key so it displays a form level error message etc.

Answer 1

You can return whatever you want from the method call return function, so you can return human readable messages as a string or object.

If Alert doesn't work for you, you can use a Modal to put up a nice message.

It's really not much code. You can populate a Session variable when there is an error and add a banner div of some sort.

If you want VALIDATION, then use a SimpleSchema with your autoform and it will work automatically, but that only validates the input matches the Schema, not backend insertion errors etc...