Improving project name validation and error messages

Open Source Development
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been setting up App Inventor locally and exploring the project creation flow. While trying different project names, I noticed that some of the validation errors (like duplicate names, empty names, or invalid characters) are a bit generic or inconsistent, and it’s not always clear to users what exactly went wrong.

I was thinking it could be helpful to improve this by:

1.Making the validation feedback more descriptive and user-friendly
2.Ensuring consistent checks between the UI and backend
3.Keeping the changes small and focused on UX only

Before starting any work, I wanted to ask here if this sounds like a reasonable first contribution and whether there’s anything specific I should be careful about or consider.

Happy to adjust the scope based on feedback.
Thanks!

1 Like
2

This sounds reasonable to me. Many of the errors are in OdeMessages.java, so you can start looking there for adjusting the language. If you want to adjust the rules, they're mainly covered in TextValidators.java.

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3

Thanks for the guidance. I’ve already opened a small PR adjusting wording in OdeMessages.java and verified it locally. I’ll follow up with a second PR adding a few @Description annotations there as suggested, and will share the link once it’s up.