Question

I’ve a c# application(in fact it runs into a windows service or like a windows application).

In receive the configuration for one run of the service/application from an XML file.

This XML file is in fact only my data serialized/deserialized in XML. It’s one of my other application that generate it.

Before running the business code, I would like to ensure that the configuration file is valid.

By this I mean things like “This String must not be null”, “This TimeSpan must have a value greater than XYZ”, …

So only verification that can be made by seing the content of the field(no need to access to something else).

It reminds me a lot the Data Annotation that I used in asp.Net MVC, and I would like if there is something similar for simple c# code, without having to load the whole asp.net MVC dll.

My other option is to implement a method “Validate()” which throw an exception if one field is incorrect, but I will have a lot of if(String.IsNullOrEmpty() and other dummy validations.

I do not want to implement myself a big validator that uses reflexion, it’s a bit overkill for only a small configuration file verification.

The application which generate those file could also be interessted to use those same validation.

Edit: I’ve to use .Net 3.5

Answer 1

I used the IDataErrorInfo(the same class will be used in the wpf application). And with a custom method where I check every possible attribute here.

Here is the method:

 public Boolean IsModelValid()
    {
        Boolean isValid = true;
        PropertyInfo[] properties = GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);

        foreach (PropertyInfo p in properties)
        {
            if (!p.CanWrite || !p.CanRead)
            {
                continue;
            }
            if (this[p.Name] != null)
            {
                isValid = false;
            }
        }
        return isValid;
    }