The first question is best answered with a principle widely used in MVC: convention over configuration. That basically means: do the less config possible, use the most default functionalities. Several examples in ASP.NET MVC
- Folder Controllers contain controllers by default.
- The name of a view corresponds to the name of a Action in a Controller.
- The folder name where a view is located corresponds to the Controller name without 'Controller' ending.
- The class name of the controller ends with 'Controller' which is omitted when calling the controller.
- The same with Attributes; the class name ends with 'Attribute' which is omitted in usage
- etc, etc, etc,
There are many more like this and it is not configured. It is convention.
The second question is already partially answered in the question itself: you cannot inherit from EmailAddressAttribute as it's a sealed class. But you can use
RegularExpressionAttribute the way it's described in your question, or create a new attribute, like I will do it below.
However this way the validation will take place only on server side. To make it on client side you need to do the following:
public class EmailAttribute : ValidationAttribute, IClientValidatable
{
private const string VALIDATION_TYPE = "customEmail";
private const string EMAIL_REGEX = @"put your regex here";
public virtual IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context)
{
yield return new ModelClientValidationRule { ValidationType = VALIDATION_TYPE, ErrorMessage = ErrorMessageString };
}
protected override ValidationResult IsValid(object value, ValidationContext validationContext)
{
var sValue = value as string;
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(sValue) && Regex.Match(sValue, EMAIL_REGEX).Success)
{
return ValidationResult.Success;
}
return new ValidationResult(string.Format(ErrorMessageString, validationContext.MemberName));
}
}
Then in Javascript (I suppose you've included jQuery, jQuery.validate and jQuery.validate.unobtrusive) use the following:
$.validator.addMethod('customEmail', function (value, element) {
let regex = /put your regex here/;
return regex.test($(element).val());
});
$.validator.unobtrusive.adapters.add('customEmail', [], function (options) {
options.messages['customEmail'] = options.message;
options.rules['customEmail'] = options.params;
});