MVC Framework Validation

I really enjoy Stephen Walther's blog. It's a fantastic mine of information on the MVC Framework. Recently he's been talking about Validation: here and here. He describes using validation attributes on his entities and then providing a validation framework that reads the entities and checks form post values against them. OK, that's my one-sentence summary, it's really quite sophisticated and you should read his posts because if you want to take that kind of approach his solution is well worked out.

I don't like it though. Call me old-fashioned, but I really like to have validation expressed in the domain entity itself. It seems a more DDD friendly way of doing things. Property setters, or constructor arguments, should throw exceptions if the values passed to them fail validation rules. Entities should enforce business rules rather than relying on convention to make them work. With Stephen's method it's easy to set an incorrect value on an entity. You have to explicitly invoke his framework in order for the attributes to be evaluated.

Here's an example from Suteki Shop.  Please ignore the LINQ-to-SQL nastiness, but here's a partial class for my Category entity. In the OnNameChanging partial method (that's triggered when the Name property is set) I'm using my validation extensions that I described here. If the value is not present (null or empty) a ValidationException is raised. You can't set Name to an empty or null string from anywhere in the application without this being checked.

using Suteki.Common;
using Suteki.Common.Validation;

namespace Suteki.Shop
{
    public partial class Category : IOrderable, IActivatable
    {
        partial void OnNameChanging(string value)
        {
            value.Label("Name").IsRequired();
        }

        public bool HasProducts
        {
            get
            {
                return Products.Count > 0;
            }
        }
    }
}

A common concern with this method is that the validation rules get triggered when an entity is retrieved from the database. Fortunately LINQ-to-SQL sets the backing field rather than the property setter so this doesn't happen. Any decent ORM will allow you to do the same thing.

The next issue is binding. You need a way of gathering any validation exceptions and presenting them all back to the user. I do this with a custom ValidatingBinder. The Category controller Update action looks like this:

public ActionResult Update(int categoryId)
{
    Category category = null;
    if (categoryId == 0)
    {
        category = new Category();
    }
    else
    {
        category = categoryRepository.GetById(categoryId);
    }

    try
    {
        ValidatingBinder.UpdateFrom(category, Request.Form);
    }
    catch (ValidationException validationException)
    {
        return View("Edit", EditViewData.WithCategory(category)
            .WithErrorMessage(validationException.Message));
    }

    if (categoryId == 0)
    {
        categoryRepository.InsertOnSubmit(category);
    }

    categoryRepository.SubmitChanges();

    return View("Edit", EditViewData.WithCategory(category).WithMessage("The category has been saved"));
}

The ValidatingBinder itself is mostly taken from the excellent MVCContrib. The main thing it does differently is collecting any ValidationExceptions raised from property setters and bundling them all into an uber ValidationException that is raised back to the controller.

I've recently updated ValidatingBinder to implement the new  IModelBinder interface from Preview 5. Very simple to do, and I'll write more about this soon. Here's the ValidatingBinder code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Reflection;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Text;
using System.Data.Linq.Mapping;
using Suteki.Common.Extensions;

namespace Suteki.Common.Validation
{
    public class ValidatingBinder
    {
        public static void UpdateFrom(object target, NameValueCollection values)
        {
            UpdateFrom(target, values, null);
        }

        public static void UpdateFrom(object target, NameValueCollection values, string objectPrefix)
        {
            var targetType = target.GetType();
            var typeName = targetType.Name;

            var exceptionMessage = new StringBuilder();

            foreach (var property in targetType.GetProperties())
            {
                var propertyName = property.Name;
                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(objectPrefix))
                {
                    propertyName = objectPrefix + "." + property.Name;
                }
                if (values[propertyName] == null)
                {
                    propertyName = typeName + "." + property.Name;
                }
                if (values[propertyName] == null)
                {
                    propertyName = typeName + "_" + property.Name;
                }
                if (values[propertyName] != null)
                {
                    var converter = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(property.PropertyType);
                    var stringValue = values[propertyName];
                    if (!converter.CanConvertFrom(typeof(string)))
                    {
                        throw new FormatException("No type converter available for type: " + property.PropertyType);
                    }
                    try
                    {
                        var value = converter.ConvertFrom(stringValue);
                        property.SetValue(target, value, null);
                    }
                    catch (Exception exception)
                    {
                        if (exception.InnerException is FormatException ||
                            exception.InnerException is IndexOutOfRangeException)
                        {
                            exceptionMessage.AppendFormat("'{0}' is not a valid value for {1}<br />", stringValue, property.Name);
                        }
                        else if (exception.InnerException is ValidationException)
                        {
                            exceptionMessage.AppendFormat("{0}<br />", exception.InnerException.Message);
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            throw;
                        }
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    // boolean values like checkboxes don't appear unless checked, so set false by default
                    if (property.PropertyType == typeof(bool) && property.HasAttribute(typeof(ColumnAttribute)))
                    {
                        property.SetValue(target, false, null);
                    }
                }
            }
            if (exceptionMessage.Length > 0)
            {
                throw new ValidationException(exceptionMessage.ToString());
            }
        }
    }
}

You can find all this code in Suteki Shop as usual.