validation-support.md

Validation Support

You can have validatable properties on your ActiveRecord classes by using ActiveRecordValidationBase instead of ActiveRecordBase

By doing so, you can use the following methods:

• IsValid: will return true only if all validation test passes
• ValidationErrorMessages: returns a string array of descriptive error messages

Example

The following class uses validations on two properties. If you attempt to save an invalid instance, ActiveRecord will throw an exception, so calling IsValid before saving it is a good idea.

using Castle.Components.Validator;

[ActiveRecord]
public class Customer : ActiveRecordValidationBase
{
    private String contactName;
    private String phone;

    public Customer()
    {
    }

    [Property, ValidateNonEmpty]
    public string ContactName
    {
        get { return contactName; }
        set { contactName = value; }
    }

    [Property, ValidateNonEmpty]
    public string Phone
    {
        get { return phone; }
        set { phone = value; }
    }
}

For a list of implemented validators and how to implement your own see Validators.

Some validation logic is not suitable for declarative (attribute based) validators. If that is your case, you can override the method IsValid. Just make sure, if your validation test passes, you invoke the base implementation.

By default, a ValidationException exception will be thrown if the validation fails. If you want to change this behavior, override the method OnNotValid.

ActiveRecordValidationBase

You can also use ActiveRecordValidationBase so you can combine the niceness of declarative validations with the power of the generic implementation of ActiveRecordBase