How to validate external exposed description field in MVC 4(C#)?

Question

I have developed a customer contact form in MVC. Which a description field for 2000 characters. This is completely external facing page. So users can enter any junk data here. I have to send this data in the XML format including other fields (like first name, last name ,email adress , etc) to another system. So XML has to accept the text from this form fields.

How can I validate when user enter data, remove un-necessary data from description field. ?

What qualifies as unnecessary data? All you have said is 2000 characters. Apart from setting a limit on number of characters you have included little else. — Gjohn, Jan 23 '14 at 17:41
If you are trying to make the data part of a valid XML document, you will need to escape it and/or put it into a CDATA section: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2784183/what-does-cdata-in-xml-mean — Tim M., Jan 23 '14 at 22:26

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 23 '14 at 22:21

On your property in your model set an attribute on it like so:

public class DataModel
  {
    [StringLength(2000, ErrorMessage = "Field cannot exceed 2000 characters")]
    public string Description { get; set; }
  }

That way the Users will remove their own junk if what they want to put in the field does not fit under 2000 characters.

How to validate external exposed description field in MVC 4(C#)?

1 Answers1