Validation Application Block Warts

As you all will have noticed from my previous post, I'm digging deeper with VAB from Enterprise Library (4.1, not 5, by-the-way). The reason for choosing VAB as my validation framework was simply the fact that I could, by using it, remove all notion of validation from the Model classes and stick it into a configuration file.

This serves two purposes:

1. On a multi-tier architecture, I could make sure presentation tiers had no access to validation structures but still use the validation classes, because the validation configuration would be deployed only at the back-end, where my BLL resides.
2. I could lookup all messages being issued by my application on a single file. Of course this would be possible by using Resources, but that is a lot of work when not planning to localize the application.

So I delved into VAB during the last couple of days. Only to get myself disappointed.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a nice framework, but the two reasons above are linked to storing the validation rules in external configuration files. And that fails miserably because VAB won't validate ancestors rules when using configuration files based validation. 

The workaround for that is to replicate every rule for an ancestor at the derived class. Which is not a real solution, since such replication will lead to errors quicker than you can say "what". 

I think this defeats the purpose of using configuration files. VAB is a choice only when dealing with complex system, and on such systems, there probably will have at least some cases of inheritance. 

Validation Application Block and Unit Testing

The Enterprise Library VAB is a very sane way of maintaining validation rules for your Model entities. I love the idea that you can keep the validation rules in a separate configuration file, because that enables you to more clearly check what rules are being applied, the messages, etc, without having to open many files.

The problem with this approach is that unit tests will fail to open the .config is usual circumstances, which will frustrate many developer. But, like almost everything in life, there's a solution, and a good one.

Check it here.