Setting the Severity Level

Given the following example that validates a Person object:

public class PersonValidator : AbstractValidator<Person>
{
  public PersonValidator()
  {
    RuleFor(person => person.Surname).NotNull();
    RuleFor(person => person.Forename).NotNull();
  }
}

By default, if these rules fail they will have a severity of Error. This can be changed by calling the WithSeverity method. For example, if we wanted a missing surname to be identified as a warning instead of an error then we could modify the above line to:

RuleFor(x => x.Surname).NotNull().WithSeverity(Severity.Warning);

In version 9.0 and above a callback can be used instead, which also gives you access to the item being validated:

RuleFor(person => person.Surname).NotNull().WithSeverity(person => Severity.Warning);

In this case, the ValidationResult would still have an IsValid result of false. However, in the list of Errors, the ValidationFailure associated with this field will have its Severity property set to Warning:

var validator = new PersonValidator();
var result = validator.Validate(new Person());
foreach (var failure in result.Errors) 
{
  Console.WriteLine($"Property: {failure.PropertyName} Severity: {failure.Severity}");
}

The output would be:

Property: Surname Severity: Warning
Property: Forename Severity: Error

By default, the severity level of every validation rule is Error. Available options are Error, Warning, or Info.

To set the severity level globally, you can set the Severity property on the static ValidatorOptions class during your application’s startup routine:

ValidatorOptions.Global.Severity = Severity.Info;

This can then be overridden by individual rules.