Question

I have a requirement for a validator class to run a series of validation methods which each return a error code. Depending on the severity of the error, I may want to abort the rest of the validations. I could check the returned error code after each call and not perform the remaining validations but this would add a lot of duplicated clutter to the main ‘driving’ routine.

So, I wrote the following helper routine that handles this for me…

public IList<Error> ValidateSet(InputType input,
    params Func<InputType, IList<Error>>[] validations)
{
    var errors = new List<Error>();

    foreach (var validation in validations)
    {
        errors.AddRange(validation(input));

        if (AbortValidations(errors))
            break;
    }

    return errors;
}

This is called as per below and works great…

var errors = new List<Error>();

errors.AddRange(
    ValidateSet(input,
        ValidateX,
        ValidateY,
        ValidateZ)
);

The problem I have now is that some validations require additional parameters other than one parameter of InputType.

Is there any way I could keep this same useful structure? Note that I can’t simply pass in the results of each validation as I don’t want to run the remaining validations if an earlier one returns an ‘abort’ error code (the validations load data so this is a performance requirement).

Thanks,
John

Answer 1

If you know the additional parameters at the time of calling ValidateSet() then you can do something like the following

ValidateSet(
    input,
    input_type => ValidateX(input_type, additional_param1),
    input_type => ValidateY(input_type, something2),
    ValidateZ
);