I'm building an invitation mechanism where owner of group can invite one or many users by providing email address(es) through rest api. This is very simple using Symfony Validator Component, but I noticed strange behavior when running tests. If I do not pass any emails I get wrong status code. 200 OK instead of 400 bad request.

After a while I found that using only \Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints\Email() is not enough. Validator will pass null values and empty string, which is obvious wrong in my case. I had to also add NotBlank constraint, don't forget that in future.

At first I thought that this is a bug, but since it's covered by separate 2 tests here https://github.com/symfony/symfony/blob/master/src/Symfony/Component/Validator/Tests/Constraints/EmailValidatorTest.php#L35 I will leave it as it is.

Credit goes to the functional tests! :)

Snippet for further reference.

    /**
     * Validates single email (or an array of email addresses
     *
     * @param array|string $emails
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function validateEmails($emails){

        $errors = array();
        $emails = is_array($emails) ? $emails : array($emails);

        $validator = $this->container->get('validator');

        $constraints = array(
            new \Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints\Email(),
            new \Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints\NotBlank()
        );

        foreach ($emails as $email) {

            $error = $validator->validateValue($email, $constraints);

            if (count($error) > 0) {
                $errors[] = $error;
            }
        }

        return $errors;
    }