Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

Getting to grips with validation interfaces

In WPF, we have access to two main validation interfaces; the original one is the IDataErrorInfo interface and in .NET 4.5, the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface was added. In this section, we'll first investigate the original validation interface and its shortcomings and see how we can make it more usable, before examining the latter.

Implementing the IDataErrorInfo interface

The IDataErrorInfo interface is a very simple affair, with only two required properties to implement. The Error property returns the error message that describes the validation error and the Item[string] indexer returns the error message for the specified property.

It certainly seems straight forward enough, so let's take a look at a ...