One thing that is not addressed by either of the .NET validation interfaces is the ability to either turn validation on or off, or to set varying levels of validation. This can be useful in several different scenarios, such as having different Views to edit different properties of a data model object.

An example of this might be having a View that enables users to update the security settings of a User object, where we want to validate that each property has a value, but only for the properties that are currently displayed in the View. After all, there is no point in informing the user that a certain field must be entered if they can't do that in their current View.

The solution is to define a number of levels of validation, in addition to the levels that represent full and no validation. Let's take a look at a simple ValidationLevel enumeration that could fulfil this requirement.

namespace CompanyName.ApplicationName.DataModels.Enums 
{ 
  public enum...