Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Introduce NValidator


I had spent 2 weeks before Christmas to develop a small library to do the validation. It's a lot similar to FluentValidation in syntax. Actually, the implementation and fluent syntax are inspired from this well-known library Fluent Validation. However, I implemented it using Chain of Reponsibility pattern and made it support Dependency Injection for validator classes. Here is a simple example that can help you to start:
public class UserValidator : TypeValidator<User>
{
    public UserValidator()
    {
        RuleFor(user => user.Id)
            .NotEmpty()
            .NotNull();

        RuleFor(user => user.UserName)
            .NotNull()
            .Length(6, 10)
            .Must(x => !x.Contains(" ")).WithMessage("@PropertyName cannot contain empty string.");

        RuleFor(user => user.Password)
            .StopOnFirstError()
            .NotEmpty()
            .Length(6, 20)
            .Must(x => x.Any(c => c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') &&
                       x.Any(c => c >= '0' && c <= '9') &&
                       x.Any(c => c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z')).WithMessage("@PropertyName must contain both letter and digit.");

        RuleFor(user => user.Title)
            .In("MR", "MS", "MRS", "DR", "PROF", "REV", "OTHER");

        RuleFor(user => user.FirstName)
            .NotEmpty().WithMessage("Please specify the first name.");

        RuleFor(user => user.LastName)
            .NotEmpty().WithMessage("Please specify the last name.");
        
        RuleFor(user => user.Email)
            .Email();

        RuleFor(user => user.Address)
            .SetValidator<AddressValidator>()
            .When(x => x != null);
    }
}
I'm currently using this library for a heavy server side validation project and so far so good. You may ask me why don't I just use FluentValidation instead of reinventing the wheel? My answer is I want to keep myself busy. I have a passionate on Fluent interfaces for a while and this is a good opportunity for me to "do something" :D Anyway, the source code repository for this project is on GitHub. The NuGet package "NValidator" is also available. Please checkout the document and other topics to get started.
Happy New Year.