A simple CKAN extension to validate tabular data powered by Frictionless.

Important: This extension does not support any kind of Cloud Storage and it is designed for docker-compose setups where workers have access to the files directly. Multistorage support will be implemented once the new File API of CKAN 2.12 is released.

Only CSV resources can be validated. Each validation run is validated with Frictionless and stored as a new row in the resource_validation table — previous results are never overwritten, so a full history is kept.

Validation can be triggered in two ways:

• Automatically, as a background job, whenever a CSV resource is created or its file is replaced. This requires the CKAN background-jobs worker to be running (see Background jobs).
• Manually, from a resource page or via the API, by a user who has resource_update permission on the resource.

The lifecycle of each background job (queued → running → finished/error) is tracked in the resource_validation_jobs table.

The validator applies some opinionated defaults (permissive numeric casting, common missing values such as null/NULL, and all columns treated as required). See get_validation_report in ckanext/validate/actions/action.py for the exact configuration.

Compatibility with core CKAN versions:

1. Activate your CKAN virtual environment, for example:

   . /usr/lib/ckan/default/bin/activate

2. Clone the source and install it on the virtualenv:

   git clone https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-validate.git
   cd ckanext-validate
   pip install -e .
   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Add validate to the ckan.plugins setting in your CKAN config file (by default located at /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini).

4. Run the database migration to create the resource_validation and resource_validation_jobs tables:

   ckan db upgrade -p validate

5. Restart CKAN. For example, if you've deployed CKAN with Apache on Ubuntu:

   sudo service apache2 reload

6. (Required for automatic validation) Start the background-jobs worker — see Background jobs.

Validates a CSV resource with Frictionless and persists the result as a new resource_validation row. Raises ValidationError if the resource is not CSV or if Frictionless itself fails.

Permissions: requires resource_update on the resource.

Parameters:

Example:

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: <your-api-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"id": "<resource-id>"}' \
  "http://localhost:5000/api/3/action/resource_validate"

Response: the validated resource dict (the same shape returned by resource_show). The action does not add validation fields to the resource — call resource_validation_show to read the stored result.

Returns the latest validation result for a resource. Raises ObjectNotFound (HTTP 404) if the resource has never been validated.

Permissions: anyone with resource_show on the resource.

Parameters:

Example:

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: <your-api-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"id": "<resource-id>"}' \
  "http://localhost:5000/api/3/action/resource_validation_show"

Response:

{
  "success": true,
  "result": {
    "id": 1,
    "resource_id": "<resource-id>",
    "status": "failure",
    "error_count": 2,
    "errors": [
      {
        "type": "type-error",
        "title": "Type Error",
        "description": "Type Error Description",
        "message": "Type error in the cell \"abc\" in row \"5\" and field \"date\"",
        "rowNumber": 5,
        "fieldName": "date",
        "fieldNumber": 3,
        "cells": ["abc"],
        "labels": ["date"]
      }
    ],
    "created": "2026-03-19T14:50:32.364757"
  }
}

Each entry in errors is a Frictionless error descriptor and keeps Frictionless's camelCase key names, e.g. rowNumber, fieldName, fieldNumber, cells, plus type, title, description, message and labels (the resource's header, when known).

The full list of errors is always persisted — the row-limit/truncation you see in the web UI is only applied at display time and does not affect what is stored in the database.

If Frictionless reports the resource as invalid but exposes no row-level task errors, a single synthetic structure-error entry is stored instead so the result is never empty.

Returns the current validation state of a resource, combining the latest background job (if any) with the latest stored validation result. Useful for polling the badge shown in the UI.

Permissions: sysadmin only.

Parameters:

Response:

{
  "success": true,
  "result": {
    "resource_id": "<resource-id>",
    "state": "success",
    "job_status": "finished",
    "error_count": 0,
    "validation": { ... }
  }
}

state is one of not_validated, pending, running, error, success, failure. A pending/running/error background job always takes precedence over a previously stored validation result. validation is the same object returned by resource_validation_show, or null when the resource has not been validated yet.

Returns the most recent background validation jobs (read-only; supports GET and POST).

Permissions: sysadmin only.

Parameters:

Example:

curl -G \
  -H "Authorization: <your-api-token>" \
  --data-urlencode "status=error" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=50" \
  "http://localhost:5000/api/3/action/validation_job_list"

Response:

{
  "success": true,
  "result": [
    {
      "id": 12,
      "resource_id": "<resource-id>",
      "status": "finished",
      "created": "2026-04-15T14:12:18.022408",
      "finished": "2026-04-15T14:12:25.110994"
    }
  ]
}

Note: manually triggered validations (via resource_validate) run synchronously and do not create a background job, so they never appear in this list.

• Resource validation page — /dataset/{package}/resource/{resource}/validate lets an editor with resource_update run validation and review the grouped error report. CSV resources also show a live status badge (auto-refreshing while a job is pending/running) on the dataset and resource pages.
• Validate File (admin) — /ckan-admin/testfile lets a sysadmin upload an arbitrary CSV to validate it without attaching it to any dataset. The uploaded file is not stored.
• Validation Jobs (admin) — /ckan-admin/validation-jobs lists recent background jobs and allows filtering by status.

Automatic validation on resource create/update runs through CKAN's RQ-based job queue, so a worker must be running for queued jobs to be processed:

ckan -c /etc/ckan/default/ckan.ini jobs worker

See the CKAN docs: https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.11/maintaining/cli.html

When a CSV resource's file is replaced, a new job is enqueued (unless one is already queued for that resource). When a resource is deleted, its background job records are removed.

None.

To install ckanext-validate for development, activate your CKAN virtualenv and do:

git clone https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-validate.git
cd ckanext-validate
pip install -e .
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

To run the tests, do:

pytest --ckan-ini=test.ini

AGPL