I disagree; I think objects should validate data. My favourite ORM, Propel, does an excellent job of this…

Namely, you can define validation rules on a per field basis (e.g. minlength, maxlength, regexp matches etc) and then you can optionally call $user->validate() before $user->save().

If you don’t call $user->validate() then your data will probably get saved (assuming there are no database constraints on fields which will result in a db exception being raised

When calling validate(), you can optionally ask it to validate only certain fields – allowing you to partially populate an object (e.g. on a multi-page form).

Finally, when validation fails, it doesn’t return an exception – validate() returns true/false; if it returns false, it’s up to you (the programmer) to call getValidationFailures() which returns a list of objects you can iterate over – each has teh field name and the validation failure message you specified in the schema.xml file.

Anyway, I like it – I’ve not yet looked at Doctrine in any depth, but don’t think it offers the same functionality (but I may be wrong).

David