FluentValidation in ASP.NET Core

FluentValidation is a wonderful validation package that is around for years. Last week I was busy with a new application in ASP.NET core. I wanted to add some validation and didn’t used FluentValidation in ASP.NET Core before. So I wanted to see if things where changed. This blog post contains some examples from the official FluentValidation Getting started documentation. In the next blog posts I will go into deeper validation of properties and reusing validators in different models.

Installation

For integration with ASP.NET Core, install the FluentValidation.AspNetCore package:

Install-Package FluentValidation.AspNetCore

Basic validation

Using the package is very easy. Let’s say you have to following class:

public class Customer {
  public int Id { get; set; }
  public string Surname { get; set; }
  public string Forename { get; set; }
  public decimal Discount { get; set; }
  public string Address { get; set; }
}

You would define a set of validation rules for this class by inheriting from AbstractValidator:

using FluentValidation; 

public class CustomerValidator : AbstractValidator<Customer> {
}

To specify a validation rule for a particular property, call the RuleFor method, passing a lambda expression that indicates the property that you wish to validate. For example, to ensure that the Surname property is not null, the validator class would look like this:

using FluentValidation;

public class CustomerValidator : AbstractValidator<Customer> {
  public CustomerValidator() {
    RuleFor(customer => customer.Surname).NotNull();
  }
}

To run the validator, instantiate the validator object and call the Validate method, passing in the object to validate.

Customer customer = new Customer();
CustomerValidator validator = new CustomerValidator();

ValidationResult result = validator.Validate(customer);

The following code would write any validation failures to the console:

if(! results.IsValid) {
  foreach(var failure in results.Errors) {
    Console.WriteLine("Property " + failure.PropertyName + " failed validation. Error was: " + failure.ErrorMessage);
  }
}

Deeper validation

In the next blog posts I will go into deeper validation with custom validators for properties and reusing validators in different models.