For months now, I’ve been desperate for a decent excuse to make a custom ASP.NET server control, so I was secretly pleased today when a CustomValidator originally coded for use on a single page was required elsewhere.
It’s surprisingly easy to do, although it took me a while to find a decent example online, which eventually came courtesy of the 4GuysFromRolla. In my particular scenario, I needed to check that the text entered into a TextBox did not equal any of a selection of "banned" strings (which was available via a static property on another class).
Having added a new custom web control, deriving from BaseValidator, my first task was therefore to ensure that the control being validated really was a TextBox – this was done by overriding the ControlPropertiesValid() method:
That done, I just had to override the EvaluateIsValid() method, which does the actual validation:
…and that was it. Job done, pretty much. OK, so I spent a while making a cute icon image too. But the coding was easy and straightforward – inheriting from BaseValidator meant that most of the work was already done for me. In no time at all I was able to drop this custom control onto the required pages and user controls.