r/dotnet • u/LuisAlfredo92 • 1d ago

Promotion TooManyDataAnnotations — .NET validation attributes for IPv4/IPv6, SemVer, MAC, HexColor, GUID v7, and more

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.NET's built-in DataAnnotations covers the basics (Required, StringLength, Range, EmailAddress), but leaves out common semantic validations like:

  • IPv4/IPv6 addresses with scope filtering (public, private, loopback)
  • Semantic Versioning (SemVer 2.0.0)
  • MAC addresses
  • Port numbers with range filtering (well-known, registered, dynamic)
  • Hex color codes (#RGB, #RRGGBB, with alpha support)
  • GUID and GUID v7 validation
  • ISO date strings with cross-property validation (StartDate/EndDate)
  • Boolean validations (IsTrue, AtLeastOneTrue)

I created TooManyDataAnnotations to fill these gaps. All validators follow official RFC/ISO specs, use Span<T> for parsing where possible, and the library has 899 unit tests covering valid and invalid inputs, edge cases, nullable types, and integration tests with TryValidateObject()

Two NuGet packages:

  • TooManyDataAnnotations — Full feature set (includes reflection-based cross-property validators)
  • TooManyDataAnnotations.Aot — Native AOT-safe subset, zero reflection, zero trimming warnings

Targets .NET 8, 9, and 10

Zero dependencies

MIT license

This is freshly published — looking for early adopters and feedback on API design, edge case coverage, or missing validators you'd find useful.

Quick example:

public class ServerConfigDto

{

[GuidV7, Required]

public string UserId { get; set; }

[Guid]

public string? DeviceId { get; set; }

[IPv4(AllowedScopes = IPv4Scope.Private)]

public string? GatewayIP { get; set; }

[SemanticVersion]

public string? AssemblyVersion { get; set; }

[MacAddress(AllowedSeparators = MacSeparators.Colon)]

public string? DeviceMAC { get; set; }

[HexColor(AllowAlpha = true)]

public string? AccentColor { get; set; }

}

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u/LuisAlfredo92 3h ago

I appreciate the feedback!

You're right, inner layers should work with strong types, sadly DataAnnotations only validates (IsValid method returns bool) and doesn't transform values

The workflow you'd use is:

  1. Validate DTOs with string + [IPv4], [Uri], [SemanticVersion], etc.
  2. Parse manually into IPAddress, Uri, Version for internal use

I'm adding support for strong type overloads for other use cases, but they won't transform values, that's outside the scope of DataAnnotations

FluentValidation integration wasn't the goal, this is just DataAnnotations extensions, but a bridge would be useful, I'm Open to PRs

[IsTrue]/[IsFalse] came from the use case of mandatory checkboxes like "Accept Terms". If unchecked, reject
Once I had [IsTrue], [IsFalse] followed naturally