Question

I have read a lot of Blog post on WPF Validation and on DataAnnotations. I was wondering if there is a clean way to use DataAnnotations as ValidationRules for my entity.

So instead of having this (Source) :

<Binding Path="Age" Source="{StaticResource ods}" ... >
  <Binding.ValidationRules>
    <c:AgeRangeRule Min="21" Max="130"/>
  </Binding.ValidationRules>
</Binding>

Where you must have your

public class AgeRangeRule : ValidationRule 
{...}

I want the WPF Binding to go see the Age property and look for DataAnnotation a bit like this:

[Range(1, 120)]
public int Age
{
  get { return _age; }
  set
  {
    _age = value;
    RaisePropertyChanged<...>(x => x.Age);
  }
}

Any ideas if this is possible ?

Answer 1

The closest approach I found is :

// This loop into all DataAnnotations and return all errors strings
protected string ValidateProperty(object value, string propertyName)
{
  var info = this.GetType().GetProperty(propertyName);
  IEnumerable<string> errorInfos =
        (from va in info.GetCustomAttributes(true).OfType<ValidationAttribute>()
         where !va.IsValid(value)
         select va.FormatErrorMessage(string.Empty)).ToList();


  if (errorInfos.Count() > 0)
  {
    return errorInfos.FirstOrDefault<string>();
  }
  return null;

Source

public class PersonEntity : IDataErrorInfo
{

    [StringLength(50, MinimumLength = 1, ErrorMessage = "Error Msg.")]
    public string Name
    {
      get { return _name; }
      set
      {
        _name = value;
        PropertyChanged("Name");
      }
    }

public string this[string propertyName]
    {
      get
      {
        if (porpertyName == "Name")
        return ValidateProperty(this.Name, propertyName);
      }
    }
}

Source and Source

That way, the DataAnnotation works fine, I got a minimum to do on the XAML ValidatesOnDataErrors="True" and it’s a fine workaround of Aaron post with the DataAnnotation.