How Good or Bad ASP.NET Validation Controls Are

When the world only knew the ASP, there were certain things which were a real time pain for the developers. They have to keep bending their back and screwing up their minds for validating the user input. User input had to be validated so that malicious use of pages cold not be achieve, so that incorrect or unwanted piece of information was not entered, so that the information stored was standardized. This sounds only a painful job.

But since the advent of ASP.NET, the life of the programmers and developers has become easier with the inclusion of validation controls. Basically, validation controls work two ways, Sever side and Client Side which is more than often done automatically whenever the need be reducing the work load of the programmer.

There are six types of controls:

• The RequiredFieldValidation Control
• The CompareValidator Control
• The RangeValidator Control
• The RegularExpressionValidator Control
• The CustomValidator Control

So now let’s see both sides of the coin as to whether these are advantageous or not so beneficial for the developers and on the whole.

Advantages:

• Minimum code writing for Client/Server Side.
• Option of assigning a particular validation to a particular control.
• Only particular validations will fire for specific areas of the screen by grouping validations and controls.
• The ways of reporting the user about the validation error are multiple.
• Having the knowledge of JAVA is not necessary.
• Gives the option of custom validation to control other validations that take care of firing the validation, displaying the error message, etc.

With benefits these many Validation Controls look all good and it would seem like a waste of time to go to the argument of listing down the not so good aspects of it. But we will do it anyway to get into the detail of the matter.

Disadvantages:

• Writing all the validations by yourself, a tedious task.
• Write code even to display an error on the screen.
• Coordinating amongst various developers to be consistent with all the error messages across various platforms.
• You have to have to knowledge of JavaScript and ASP.NET.

So it seems like there are more benefits than the disadvantages. Giving the programmers a bit of a relief from the extra botheration they had before.