Sanitizing Stored TV IDs Before getDocuments Queries in Evolution CMS

Some of the most painful Evolution CMS bugs came from small data-shape problems hiding in old TVs. This case involved a TV that used to store comma-separated resource IDs as text, later changed to a listbox, and one stale value like 22, was enough to break output through getDocuments().

The underlying problem

A malformed ID list was being passed from a TV into template logic and eventually into the API. Because getDocuments() did not guard against dirty values in the incoming array, the bad record triggered an SQL error. Worse, the broken document was buried somewhere inside a large content set.

The fix

The historical patch was simple and sensible: normalize the incoming IDs first, cast them to integers, and discard anything that does not become a valid non-zero identifier before building the query.

foreach ($ids as $id) {
    if (intval($id) != 0) $newIds[] = intval($id);
}
$ids = $newIds;

Why this matters

This is a classic Evo engineering lesson: a tiny defensive check in a low-level API boundary can save hours of debugging later. It also documents a very real migration hazard when TVs change type but old stored values do not fully match the new format.

Related posts

Understanding Checkbox TV Value Formats in Evolution CMS
Updating TV Values for a Specific Resource Through the Evolution API