Client form validation allows duplicate client names

Hmm...I think I like the approach, but just disabling the field and not letting the user know that we're doing this on purpose seems a bit odd to me. Could we change the description to let the user know that we're going to autogenerate the internal name the first time, and they can change it later.

#4 is looking better.

Yeah, it'll be a bit weird if we have mulitple clients with the same name anywhere. There are modules that do this already, but I suspect they are mostly UI code, so we could steal the useful parts of one of those, or just roll our own?

Maybe we could make the autocomplete forms look at the internal name instead of the client name? Or look at both but enter the internal name in the field?

i am not sure I like this infinite loop:

-function hosting_client_validate_suggest($node) {
+function hosting_client_validate_suggest($name, $internal = FALSE) {
   $suggestion = FALSE;
-  for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
-    $nid = db_result(db_query("SELECT nid FROM {hosting_client} WHERE uname LIKE '%s%%'", addcslashes(hosting_client_sanitize($node->title) . $i, '\%_')));
+  $table = $internal ? 'hosting_client' : 'node';
+  $field = $internal ? 'uname' : 'title';
+  $name = $internal ? hosting_client_sanitize($name) : $name;
+
+  $counter = 0;
+  while (TRUE) {
+    $nid = db_result(db_query("SELECT nid FROM {%s} WHERE %s = '%s'", $table, $field, $name . $counter));
     if (!$nid) {
-      $suggestion = $node->title . $i;
-      break;
+      return $name . $counter;
     }
+    $counter++;
   }
-  return $suggestion;
 }

the reason this was breaking after 10 attempts was that we had a ceiling of 10 requests to check suggestions. we could raise that by a few order of magnitudes if you want, but think about it: if we set the limit to 1000 requests, that means that there will be 1000 SQL requests for a single HTTP query - that's huge, and that's if the limit is at 1000. If there's no limit (as the patch does), we could simply DOS the MySQL server.

Also, don't return in function hosting_client_validate(). We want to validate all fields so that the user sees all the error in the form in one shot, and not have to fix one error, submit the form, fix the other error, submit the form, etc.

fatal: ambiguous argument '1fc8aa1': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

sorry to be picky, but please bring back the for (;;) loop :)

good, thanks.