What does the @Valid annotation indicate in Spring?

Question

In the following example, the ScriptFile parameter is marked with an @Valid annotation.

What does @Valid annotation do?

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Answer 1

@Valid in itself has nothing to do with Spring. It's part of Bean Validation specification(there are several of them, the latest one being JSR 380 as of second half of 2017), but @Valid is very old and derives all the way from JSR 303.

As we all know, Spring is very good at providing integration with all different JSRs and java libraries in general(think of JPA, JTA, Caching, etc.) and of course those guys took care of validation as well. One of the key components that facilitates this is MethodValidationPostProcessor.

Trying to answer your question - @Valid is very handy for so called validation cascading when you want to validate a complex graph and not just a top-level elements of an object. Every time you want to go deeper, you have to use @Valid. That's what JSR dictates. Spring will comply with that with some minor deviations(for example I tried putting @Validated instead of @Valid on RestController method and validation works, but the same will not apply for a regular "service" beans).