Bean validation not working until JPA entity is merged

Question

When the backing bean of the Facelet invokes setLastName("Test!!!") no ConstraintViolationException is thrown, although the non-alpha chars are clearly present in the method argument.

I set a breakpoint to verify that setLastName was being invoked and I observed the JPA entity's lastName value change. Validation should fail immediately, yes? It's not.

Later, when it's time to persist the changes, when EntityManager#merge is invoked, the ConstraintViolationException is thrown.

List of constraint violations:[ ConstraintViolationImpl{interpolatedMessage='error.spacesandletters', propertyPath=lastName, rootBeanClass=class foo.bar.business.model.entity.authenticate.User, messageTemplate='error.spacesandletters'}]

private String lastName;

@Column(name="lastname", nullable=false, length=40)
@Size(max=40)
@NotNull
@Basic(optional=false)
@Pattern(regexp="[A-Za-z ]*", message="error.spacesandletters")
public String getLastName() { return this.lastName; }

public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; }

So I know that validation is available and that it is working at JPA pre-persist. But for some reason it's not working at the moment User#setLastName is first invoked via the backing bean. What am I doing wrong?

EDIT #1:

I should have mentioned that my ChangePasswordBean works just fine with the following two custom annotations.

@NotEmpty @Password private String password1;
@NotEmpty @Password private String password2;

But in this case the backing bean's fields are annotated. Whereas in the example above the backing bean is pointing to the JPA entity whose getters are annotated.

EDIT #2:

After reading BalusC's reference to this other question in which he was thinking that the problem might be related to a known Mojarra bug that was fixed in v. 2.2.7 I upgraded to Mojarra 2.2.8-01. Here's the entry in the Wildfly startup log:

17:41:51,965 INFO [org.jboss.as.jsf] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 38) JBAS012615: Activated the following JSF Implementations: [mojarra-2.2.8-01, main]

Unfortunately, the problem I've described has not gone away. Bean validation annotations on the JPA entity are not working whereas bean validation annotations on the JSF managed bean are working.

Just a wild guess - would moving annotations from get to set (or even better - to field itself) change anything? — Deltharis
if you do not have @Validation in your controller, validation will just happen in Persist/Merge level. I am not familiar with Facelet and JSF, but there should be something similar with Spring-MVC in terms of validation. — pms
@pmp: @Validation? No such thing in javax.validation.constraints. P.S. I'm not using Spring. — Patrick Garner
@Deltharis can't put annotations on getter; it's against the Bean Validation spec. Moving to field itself had better not change anything, else the spec. is not being followed by the container. — Patrick Garner
Which Mojarra version? Which container impl/version? Are you using JRebel? In any case, this is perhaps a dupe: stackoverflow.com/questions/25264868/… — BalusC

Hardy Hardy · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-13T15:31:31

That is the correct behaviour. If you relying on JPA event based validation, validation occurs at the pre-update event. There is no life cycle event available which would trigger at the change of a single field. And really this would only work with instrumented classes, since otherwise there would be no way to even intercept the setting of the value. Also, Bean Validation is in its core a framework to validate whole beans and its associations. So even if there is validateValue and validateProperty in the Validation API, the main validation routine is validate which takes a bean/object as parameter.

So to answer your question:

Validation should fail immediately, yes?

No, it should not.

Do you really need a direct validation on calling the setter? There are ways to do this, but it would involve writing some custom code and you would either need to use a compile or runtime interception framework.

Bean validation not working until JPA entity is merged

1 Answers