ASP.NET MVC 2 validation using DTOs instead of domain entities

Posted by Kevin Pang on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Kevin Pang
Published on 2010-04-03T14:52:01Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 15:03 UTC
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I'm struggling to mesh two best practices together:

  1. Using DataAnnotations + ModelBinding for validation in ASP.NET MVC 2
  2. Using DTOs instead of domain entities when passing data via the ViewModel

If I want to pass over DTOs instead of domain entities, then leveraging DataAnnotations + ModelBinding for validation would require me to specify validation attributes on my DTO classes. This results in a lot of duplicated work since multiple DTOs may hold overlapping fields with the same validation restrictions. This means that any time I change a validation rule in my domain, I have to go find all DTOs that correspond with that value and update their validation attributes.

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