ASP.NET MVC 2: Model Validation
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by Scott Guthrie
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Step 4: Creating a Custom [Email] Validation Attribute

The System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace within the .NET Framework includes a number of built-in validation attributes that you can use.  We’ve used 4 different ones in the sample above - [Required], [StringLength], [Range], and [RegularExpression].

You can also optionally define your own custom validation attributes and use them as well.  You can define completely custom attributes by deriving from the ValidationAttribute base class within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace.  Alternatively, you can choose to derive from any of the existing validation attributes if you want to simply extend their base functionality. 

For example, to help clean up the code within our Person class we might want to create a new [Email] validation attribute that encapsulates the regular expression to check for valid emails.  To do this we can simply derive it from the RegularExpression base class like so, and call the RegularExpression’s base constructor with the appropriate email regex:

We can then update our Person class to use our new [Email] validation attribute in place of the previous regular expression we used before – which makes the code more clean and encapsulated:

image

When creating custom validation attributes you can specify validation logic that runs both on the server and on the client via JavaScript.

In addition to creating validation attributes that apply to individual properties on an object, you can also apply validation attributes at the class level – which allows you to perform validation logic across multiple properties within an object.  For an example of this in action, you can review the “PropertiesMustMatchAttribute” custom attribute that is included in the AccountModels.cs/vb file within the default ASP.NET MVC 2 application project template (just do a File->New ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Project within VS 2010 and look for this class). 


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Title: asa   
Name: sd
Date: 2012-11-12 9:15:33 AM
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