I have a complex view model which has some subclasses. For the sake of a simple example, let’s assume there’s one subclass.
That subclass is displayed by rendering a partial view. The user can toggle that view in the interface, completely hiding the whole thing.
Now there are two valid input options:
- The user chooses to hide the partial and doesn’t fill in anything. The whole thing should be ignored.
- The user chooses to view the partial, now he has to fill it in. Some of the fields are required, some are not.
What’s a good way to handle this is MVC validation? I cannot mark the fields as Required, since the postback will post the empty values and the server side logic will say ModelState.IsValid is false beacuse there are fields missing.
Of course I can lose the [Required] attributes and do the checks manually myself, but I was wondering if there’s no better way to get the same result.
The simplest way of doing this is like this ASP.NET MVC 3 Data Annotation: Add validation dynamically.
For a harder (a bit nicer) solution read this: DataAnnotations "NotRequired" attribute