Question

I have a set of model classes from another section of the application that cannot be modified. These do not have the validation attributes I need (RemoteAttribute for instance). How do I go about adding these? I can’t add [MetadataTypeAttribute] to models.

To illustrate:

    //in Models.dll
    //remember: I can't modify this
    public class Product
    {
        string Name { get; set; }
    }

   //in Web.dll
    public class ProductController
    {
        // GET: /Product/
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View(new Product());
        }
    }

    //what i need:
    public class ProductMetadata
    {
        [Remote("Foo", "Bar")]
        [RegularExpression]
        string Name { get; set; }
    }

Is this in any way possible without creating a ViewModel class or something of that sort?

Answer 1

Is this in any way possible without creating a ViewModel class

Assuming that a properly architected ASP.NET MVC application should always use view models you can only benefit from introducing them. In addition to solving this particular problem and hundreds of potential other problems you will have a properly architected ASP.NET MVC application 🙂

Tying your model to a controller (which is what the RemoteAttribute will do) seems like a horrible idea in terms of reusability of this model in other applications.