BACKGROUND:

I am of the "user-input-lockdown" school of thought. Whenever possible, I try to mistrust and sanitize user input, both client side and server side; and I try to take multiple opportunities to restrict possible inputs to a known subset of possibilities, usually this means providing a lot of checkboxes and select lists. (This is from the usability side of things, I know security-wise that malicious users can easily bypass fixed user input GUI controls).

PROBLEM:

Anyway, the problem always arises with non-fixed input of currency. Whenever I have to accept a freely-specified dollar amount as user input, I always have to confront these problems/annoyances and it is always painful:

• 1) Make sure to give the user two input boxes for each currency_datapoint, one for the whole_dollar_part and another for the fractional_pennies_part

• 2) Whenever the user changes a currency_datapoint, provide keystroke-by-keystroke GUI feedback to let them know whether the currency_datapoint is well-formed, with context-appropriate validation rules (e.g., no negatives?, nonzero only?, numeric only!, no non-numeric punctuation! no symbols!)

• 3) For display purposes, every user-provided currency_datapoint should be translated to human-readable currency formatting (dollar sign, period, commas provided by the app, where appropriate)

• 4) For calculation purposes, every user-provided currency_datapoint has to be converted to integer (all pennies, to avoid floating point errors) and summed into a grand total with zero or more subtotals.

• 5) Every user-provided currency_datapoint should be displayed or displayable in a nice "tabular" format, which auto-updates as the user enters each currency_datapoint, including a baloon that warns when one or more currency_datapoints is not well-formed.

I seem to be re-inventing this wheel every time I have to work with currency in Javascript on the client side (server side is a bit more flexible since most programming languages have higher-level currency formatting logic).

QUESTION:

Has anyone out there solved the problem of dealing with the above issues, client side, in a way that is server-side-technology-stack agnostic, (preferrably plain javascript or jquery)?

This is getting old, there has to be a better way.