Spring, JSR 303 Validation and Hibernate

Question

I'm currently developing an application with Spring using Hibernate as ORM. I know that Hibernate by default uses JSR-303 Bean Validation whenever an entity is persisted or loaded. As this application supports drafts (and i want validations to be performed after persisting) i had to add this to persistence.xml:

<validation-mode>NONE</validation-mode>

for hibernate not to perform these validation. The problem is that when i try to manually perform bean validation on an entity (when a draft becomes a document) the element that are not yet loaded by hibernate (instances of PersistentBag by the time of validation) are not validated, here is a code example.

Controller method code:

@RequestMapping(value = "/entity/{entity_id}", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public String completeEntity(@PathVariable("entity_id") Long entity_id)
{
    //myEntityService was autowired in the controller
    MyEntity myEntity = myEntityService.findById(entity_id);
    //Here comes the bean validation
    DataBinder binder = new DataBinder(myEntity);
    //validator was also autowired
    binder.setValidator(validator);
    binder.validate();
    BindingResult result = binder.getBindingResult();
    if (result.hasErrors()) {
        //handleErrors
    }
    //continue doing stuff, marking the entity as 'not draft' and persisting it...
}

Model entities code:

@Entity
@Table(name = "myEntity")
public class MyEntity{
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    @NotBlank 
    String foo;

    // bi-directional one-to-many association to Bar
    //Note the valid annotation, as i want all related Bar's to be validated
    //when a MyEntity is validated
    @Valid
    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "myEntity")
    private List<Bar> bars;

    //Getters and Setters...
}

@Entity
@Table(name = "bar")
public class Bar{
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    @NotBlank 
    String barFoo;

    // bi-directional many-to-one association to MyEntity
    @ManyToOne
    private MyEntity myEntity;

    //Getters and Setters...
}

I'd like to know how can i propagate bean validation so that whenever a MyEntity instance is validated, all associated Bar's are validated as well, without having to forcefully load these entities right before validation.

Gunnar Gunnar · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-01T06:51:03

You could implement a custom traversable resolver and configure Bean Validation to use this one.

The default implementation makes sure no objects are loaded from the database (with the assumption being that they have been successfully validated upon the last write), but you could override this for specific associations as per your requirements.

Spring, JSR 303 Validation and Hibernate

1 Answers