Using Business Entities with Silverlight front end and standard Class Library Business Layers.

09-03-2009 6:17 PM |

I'm having a problem working with business entities with Silverlight and the Business Layer. I totally understand that the CLR's are different between Silverlight and standard .NET assemblies.

 Here is my situation. In a standard  .NET class library I have a business entity called Client, it contains things like Name, Address etc. Now I want to use the same Client object in Silverlight. So I create a Silverlight class library and simply link to the file that has the Client class, this way I can share the code. My issue comes in with meta data for validation and display. They are not equal between the two types of projects. So the following code will not compile in my standard .NET class library.

        private string _FirstName;
        [Display(Name = "First Name", Description = "The first name of the prospect.")]
        [Required(ErrorMessage="The first name is required.")]
        [StringLength(50,ErrorMessage="The first name can not be more than 50 characters.")]
        public string FirstName
        {
            get { return _FirstName; }
            set
            {
                Validator.ValidateProperty(value, new ValidationContext(this,null,null) {MemberName = "FirstName"});
                _FirstName = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("FirstName");
            }
        }

 The Display Attribute will not compile. Is the only work around for this to actually duplicate all my business entities  for Silverlight and Standard .Net? Or is there another way to accomplish this? I know I could just manually add display and description on the UI  elements themselves, but these objects are used on many pages, they amount of duplication and potential for error would be insane and just feels wrong.

 Any help would be appreciated.

Artin.

EDIT:
Forgot to mention Validator.ValidateProperty also wont compile. Not too muck work to externalize and just raise exceptions manually.