Validation received a major upgrade in Crestone, going from regular expressions firing up when the item is saved, to a powerful setup of validator classes running at different stages and providing UI feedback through different means.

Configuration

Validators are configured in a new content tree location in the master database:

/sitecore/system/settings/Validation Rules

Field Rules and Item Rules folders define available validators, and Field Types and Global rules configure the validators to be run for all items and fields of given field type.

In addition to the global configuration, it's possible to add validators for individual items and fields.

For items, there are four new fields in standard template, grouped in the new Validation section. As usual, the best practice is to only change these at template level and use standard values to propagate data to individual items.

For fields, "template field" template also has four additional fields that allow validators to be added at field configuration level.

So the formula is:

Item validators = Global Rules + Validators defined on the item itself using new standard template fields
Field validators = Field Types rules (matched by the field type) + rules defined on the template field.

Whichever strategy you use to configure validation, you'll always have to deal with these four treelist fields:

Validation Types

So what are these? Quick Action Bar, Validate Button, Validator Bar and Workflow represent four distinct sets of validations you can define for each item and field:

Validator Bar is the most powerful validation device. Notice the red marker to the left of the field - it indicates that the field contains an error. Hovering over the bar will display a tooltip with the error message returned by the validator. Validator bar to the right of the Content Editor duplicates this information, providing validation summary for the entire item and all of its fields.

Important: Validators configured to run in the validator bar are updated in the real time. As soon as you stop editing the field, the validators will be run asynchronously in background, and the UI will be updated.

Quick Action Bar (left) is another Content Editor upgrade that displays status for each item visible in the tree and allows quick actions, such as check in, to be performed. Validation is turned off by default, so to enable it, you need to right click the Quick Action Bar and make sure that "Validation Rules" menu item is checked.

Validate Button represents a new Validation Results dialog, that displays the most detailed validation status for the current item:

Workflow defines the validators, which will be run when the item is moved from one workflow state to another. It's implemented with a new workflow action, which allows to define workflow states that should be guarded by the validation:

Item with significant validation errors will not be allowed to the next state. I'll show how define which errors are "significant" and what other effects they have in the UI in the following parts.

This post is a part of series about new validation features introduced in Sitecore 6:

Part 1: Introduction, configuration, validation types.
Part 2: Error levels, built-in validators.
Part 3: Making a custom validator.
Part 4: Making a validator fix action.