DataAnnotations on public fields vs properties in MVC

Question

Why don\'t DataAnnotations work on public fields? Example:

namespace Models
{
    public class Product
    {
        [Display(Name = \"Name\")]
        publi         


        

Answer 1

The reason why DataAnnotations do not work with fields is because the reflection-like mechanism that is used to retrieve the attributes (TypeDescriptor) only supports properties.

While it would not be easy, we could look into making this work with fields if there is enough demand.