Email validation in SharePoint 2010

Question

We have a column of type "E-Mail" and we'd like to attach validation to it so it conforms to the normal regular expression email validations at a specific domain. Is this possible without writing a web part in Visual Studio? Thank you.

Answer 1

This codeplex project allows you to add regular expression validation to fields

Codeplex - SharePoint Custom Field Type - Regular Expressions

Be very careful trying to validate email addresses using RegEx though (either through this tool or javascript) - its seems like a ideal candidate for regex until you get into the details and there are a lot of samples out there that are wrong.

For example :-

• Hardly any one will accept apostrophes in the email - yes o'callahan@tld.com is valid!
• Many of the example out there will not accept bob@tate.museum TLD and this will only become unmanageable now that the restrictions on creating TLD's have been relaxed.

Answer 2

Other methods you can use:

• Create a validation formula in the List Settings / Validation Settings.
• Add some script to your forms to validate on the blur event or in the PreSaveAction

I prefer using script on the blur event because I can give immediate feedback to the user, as they are used to on other modern Web sites.

Answer 3

This link gives you two different options. One that involves inserting a hidden web part in the EditForm for the list, and using JQuery to do the actual RegEx validation. Another option is to go with the third-party tool Christian refers to in the article.