Fhir validate structure definition does not seem to work

Question

I have some custom code which creates a structure definition based on some user inputs. The way it works is to set up a differential by getting structure definition requirements from user, generates the snapshot and finally I persist it into local storage on Fhir Server. I tried the following code snippet to validate the StructureDefinition before persisting it to database, but the validationResult is always null no matter what the structureDefinition I will pass to it. Could anyone let me know of the correct way to validate a customized StructureDefinition?

var structureDefinition = ...    
ICollection<ValidationResult> validationResult = null;
DotNetAttributeValidation.TryValidate(structureDefinition, validationResult);

Answer 1

There's a third (optional) parameter to TryValidate that is called 'recurse', you should try setting that to "true", otherwise the validate will only do the direct elements of the structuredefinition, not the data inside the types etc.