Validating inputs and data is crucial for several reasons:
Proper validation helps prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other forms of attacks that exploit unvalidated input.
Ensuring that the data entered into your system is correct and consistent helps maintain the integrity of your database and other data stores. This prevents issues like corrupted data, which can lead to incorrect application behavior or data loss.
Validating inputs can provide immediate feedback to users, helping them correct mistakes before submitting forms. This improves the overall user experience by making the application more user-friendly.
By validating inputs, you can catch errors early in the process, reducing the likelihood of bugs and issues that could arise from invalid data being processed by your application.
Many industries have regulations and standards that require data validation to ensure compliance. For example, healthcare applications must validate data to comply with HIPAA regulations.
Validating data at the point of entry can reduce the need for extensive error handling and correction later in the process, which can improve the overall performance of your application.
See the chapter on Data Validation for some common simple validation checks.
Data verification ensures that data is accurate, consistent, and reliable. It is a critical step in maintaining data quality.
Verification checks that the data entered matches the source of the data. This helps in ensuring that the data is correct and free from errors.
Verification ensures that data is consistent across different systems and databases. This helps in maintaining uniformity and reliability of data.
Verification processes help in ensuring that the data is reliable and can be trusted for decision-making and analysis.
Similar to validation, verification is also important for compliance with industry regulations and standards. Verified data ensures that the organization meets legal and regulatory requirements.
Verifying data can improve the performance of your application by ensuring that only accurate and consistent data is processed, reducing the need for error handling and corrections later.
See the chapter on Data Verification for some common verification techniques.