Using ASP.Net MVC Data Annotation outside of MVC

Question

Hi there,

i was wondering if there is a way to use ASP.Net's Data annotation without the MVC site.

My example is that i have a class that once created needs to be validated, or will throw an error. I like the data annotations method, instead of a bunch of if blocks fired by the initaliser.

Is there a way to get this to work?

I thought it would be something like:

• Add data annotations
• Fire a method in the initialiser that calls the MVC validator on the class

any ideas? i must admit i havent added the MVC framework to my project as i was hoping i could just use the data annotations class System.ComponentModel.DataValidation

Answer 1

Here's an example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;

public class Foo
{
    [Required(ErrorMessage = "the Bar is absolutely required :-)")]
    public string Bar { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var foo = new Foo();
        var results = new List<ValidationResult>();
        var context = new ValidationContext(foo, null, null);
        if (!Validator.TryValidateObject(foo, context, results))
        {
            foreach (var error in results)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(error.ErrorMessage);
            }
        }
    }
}

But quite honestly FluentValidation is much more powerful.