Setting attributes of a property in partial classes

Question

I have an employee class generated by Entity Framework (EF).

public partial class employee
{
    private string name;
    public string Name
    {
        ge         


        

Answer 1

Another way to do this is:

private class EmployeeMetadata
{
    //the type HAS to match what your have in your Employee class
    [Required]
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public partial class Employee : EmployeeMetadata
{
}

At least this worked with Linq to SQL. However I had trouble accessing the attributes through GetCustomAttributes (even using System.Attribute.GetCustomAttributes didn't seem to help). Nonetheless MVC did respect those attributes. Additionally this will not work with inheriting from interfaces. Passing attributes from interface will only work using MetadataType class attribute (see answer by Ladislav Mrnka).