Model Validation In Web API Using Data Annotation

I hope you are more or less familiar with the MVC architecture. If not, I suggest you become familiar with the basics of MVC architecture before going through this article. Here we will understand the concept of Model validation in Web API applications using the Data Annotation technique.

We know that a Model is nothing but a business object in an application, in other ways it’s nothing but our DTO classes. Now, since a Model is nothing but a pure C# class in the MVC architecture containing properties and functions it’s necessary to validate a Model before saving model data in persistent storage.

Implement Model class

Here is our Student Model class containing three properties and we have specified the necessary attributes over those properties.

public class Student
{
   [Required]
   [Range(1, 100)]
   public int Roll { get; set; }
   [MaxLength(5)]
   public string name { get; set; }
   public string surname { get; set; }
}

This validation requires the following namespace.

using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;

Ok, so we have specifed that the Roll field is required and its value should be between 1 and 100. In the name property we have specifed that the maximum number of characters would be 5 (though that’s highly unrealistic) otherwise it will throw a not validated exception.

Implement Post() method

Here we will implement the Post() method that will consume data from the client end. Have a look at the following code.

public class ValuesController : ApiController
{
   public HttpResponseMessage Post([FromBody] Student s)
   {
      if (ModelState.IsValid)
      {
         return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK);
      }
      else
         return Request.CreateErrorResponse(HttpStatusCode.BadRequest, ModelState);
      }
   }
}

The Post() method is very simple, it only takes an object of the model class and we have specified the FromBody attribute before the parameter; that indicates that we will pass the parameter value through the body of the request message.

In fiddle at first we are sending the following data in JSON format. Intentionally we are sending invalid data.

And in the response we are seeing that the model is not validated and the response message is in the lower section of the output screen.

Now, we will get a taste of the Model validation with valid input. Here is another output screen where we are feeding valid data in the POST request.

 

We are getting a 200 status code (though it should 201, in reality it should return the path of the new resource creation) that we can implement in a few lines of code.

Conclusion

In this example we have learned Model validation using the Data Annotation method. I hope it will help in your actual MVC applications.