Poka-Yoke in PHP: Guarding Business Operations Before They Run

Description and use

Novora PokaYoke lets PHP developers explicitly check business operation preconditions, collect all violations, and execute the action only when all checks pass, improving code clarity and maintainability.

Problem

Business operations often require multiple independent preconditions; inline checks can hide failures and only report the first missing condition.

Outcome

The package provides a concise API to define rules, collect violations, and guard operations, improving clarity and maintainability of business logic.

Workflow

• Define rule classes implementing Novora\PokaYoke\Rule that return null or a Violation.
• Instantiate Novora\PokaYoke\Guard and call check() with the context and an array of rules.
• If check() returns allowed, proceed with the operation; otherwise handle violations.
• Alternatively, use Guard::execute() to combine checking and callback execution in one step, catching OperationBlocked to access violations.
• Ensure rules are side‑effect free and application decides how to present or translate violation messages.

Evidence

A separate check followed by an action is useful for displaying diagnostics, but the package also offers a compact operation boundary:

Source

The initial v1.0.0 release was validated with 15 PHPUnit tests (27 assertions)...

Source

A successful precondition check does not guarantee the state will still be valid when the callback commits its changes.

Source