I’m using ASP.NET WebApi for some months and even if I like them everytime I have to dig into the source code to understand some not_so_well_documented feature I’m impressed about the complexity of the implementation. One case is the Model Binding mechanism that has at least three different complicated ways of doing a quite simple thing, another is the creation of CustomValidators, where even Google doesn’t help so much.
What I had to do is to build a model validator that has a dependency on an external service to verify certain conditions.
I started creating this validator:
public class MyCustomValidatorAttribute : ValidationAttribute
{
private readonly IMyService _service;
public MyCustomValidatorAttribute(IMyService service)
{
_service = service;
}
public override bool IsValid(object value)
{
_service.Foo(value);
return true;
}
}
The point here is that this validator depends on IMyService so I need to be able to inject the dependendency. Delving into the WebApi source code I found the DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider that seemed to be a good candidate to start. In fact I had to use this class to define how the MyCustomValidatorAttribute should be created. So in the WebApiConfig class inside the register method I added this code:
DataAnnotationsModelValidationFactory factory = (p, a) => new DataAnnotationModelValidator(
new List<ModelValidationProvider>(), new MyCustomValidatorAttribute(new MyService())
);
DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider provider = new DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider();
provider.RegisterAdapterFactory(typeof(MyCustomAttribute), factory);
configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(ModelValidationProvider), provider);
Aside the fact that class names are so long that the above code is almost unreadable, what I did is to configure a new factory that is in charge of creating a the new model validator with its dependencies.
Easy…once discovered!
