Can JSR 303 Bean Validation be used with Spring Data Rest?

Question

I understand from the docs http://docs.spring.io/spring-data/rest/docs/2.1.2.RELEASE/reference/html/validation-chapter.html that I can declare validators with certain prefix

Answer 1

//Edit - Giving more information based on the comment for this answer and changing the code accordingly.

Related Documentation - http://spring.io/blog/2013/11/01/exception-handling-in-spring-mvc

Notes

//This is making the handler global for the application
//If this were on a @Controller bean it would be local to the controller
@ControllerAdvice

//Specifies to return a 400
@ResponseStatus(value = HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST)

//Which exception to handle
@ExceptionHandler(ConstraintViolationException.class)

//Specifies to make the return value JSON.
@ResponseBody

//This class if for modeling the error we return.
//(Could use HashMap also if you feel it's cleaner)
class ConstraintViolationModel {

This is an exception handler for Spring that should work in spring boot just fine.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.validation.ConstraintViolation;
import javax.validation.ConstraintViolationException;

import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ControllerAdvice;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseStatus;

@ControllerAdvice
public class ExceptionHandlingController {
    @ResponseStatus(value = HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST)
    @ExceptionHandler(ConstraintViolationException.class)
    public @ResponseBody List handleConstraintViolation(
            HttpServletRequest req, final ConstraintViolationException exception) {
        ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
        for (ConstraintViolation violation : exception
                .getConstraintViolations()) {
            list.add(new ConstraintViolationModel(violation.getPropertyPath()
                    .toString(), violation.getMessage(), violation
                    .getInvalidValue()));
        }
        return list;
    }

    private static class ConstraintViolationModel {
        public String field;
        public String message;
        public Object invalidValue;

        public ConstraintViolationModel(String field, String message,
                Object invalidValue) {
            this.field = field;
            this.message = message;
            this.invalidValue = invalidValue;
        }
    }
}