I am currently unit testing a service that adds users to a repository.

I am using dependency injection to test using a fake repository.

The repository has a method CreateUser(User user) which just adds it to the database or in this case a List of Users.

The logic for the creation is in the UserServices class.

The application has a form for creating a user that requires some properties such as name and address.

This is an MVC 2 app and I will be using the new validation using data annotations.

This makes me wonder about a few things:

1) Should I annotate a POCO object that will map to the database? Or should I create a specific View Model that has these annotations and pass this data to the UserServices class?

2)Should the UserServicesClass also check this data? Would I best be constructing a Usr out of the ViewModel and passing this into the Service as a parameter?

3) The actual unit testing would depend on 2), I either populate a User object and pass that in, or I pass a large list of strings to the method CreateUser.

Writing this out I get a basic idea that I should probably annotate the view model only, pass in a user (constructed by the view model if the data is valid) and also just construct the user in the unit test also.

Is this the best way to go?