Question

I have a string property on an entity that I would like to mark as required. For example,

public class Product
{
    public virtual string Name { get; set; }
}

In my mappings, I can declare Name as required (using Fluent NHibernate):

mapping.Map(x => x.Name).Required();

However, this only restricts the string from being null. If I assign it to String.Empty, NHibernate will happily store the value of "" into the database.

My question is, is there a way of enforcing a minimum length for strings? For example, in this case, a product name should be at least 3 characters. Or will my business logic need to handle this instead of NHibernate?

Answer 1

Using the NHibernate validator:

public class Product
{
    [Length(Min=3,Max=255,Message="Oh noes!")]
    public virtual string Name { get; set; }
}