Phone Number Validation MVC

I am trying to use a regular expression to validate a phone number and return an error when an invalid number or phone number is submitted.

MVC Code:

<ol class="row">
    <li class="cell" style="width: 20%;">Phone Number:</li>
    <li class="cell last" style="width: 60%;">
        @Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.PhoneNumber, new { @class = "textbox" }) 
        @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.PhoneNumber)
    </li>
</ol>

C# Code:

[DataType(DataType.PhoneNumber)]
[Display(Name = "Phone Number")]
[Required(ErrorMessage = "Phone Number Required!")]
[RegularExpression(@"^\(?([0-9]{3})\)?[-. ]?([0-9]{3})[-. ]?([0-9]{4})$",
                   ErrorMessage = "Entered phone format is not valid.")]
public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }

However, the input box will not show a message to the user indicating that the phone number which was submitted is not valid.

Answer

October 31, 2018

KyleMit

[DataType(DataType.PhoneNumber)] does not come with any validation logic out of the box.

According to the docs:

When you apply the DataTypeAttribute attribute to a data field you must do the following:

Issue validation errors as appropriate.

The [Phone] Attribute inherits from [DataType] and was introduced in .NET Framework 4.5+ and is in .NET Core which does provide it's own flavor of validation logic. So you can use like this:

[Phone()]
public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }

However, the out-of-the-box validation for Phone numbers is pretty permissive, so you might find yourself wanting to inherit from DataType and implement your own IsValid method or, as others have suggested here, use a regular expression & RegexValidator to constrain input.

Note: Use caution with Regex against unconstrained input per the best practices as .NET has made the pivot away from regular expressions in their own internal validation logic for phone numbers