JSR-303 bean validation with Spring does not kick in

Question

I\'ve configured a JSR-303 custom validator following what\'s given in the docs (http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/validation.html), co

Answer 1

1. A MethodValidationPostProcessor needs to be configured in addition to the LocalValidatorFactoryBean.

2. The class to be validated must have a @Validated annotation on it else methods are NOT searched for inline constraint annotations.

   @Configuration
   @ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = {SpringPackageComponentScanMarker.class})
   @EnableAspectJAutoProxy
   public abstract class AppConfig {
   
   @Bean
   public MethodValidationPostProcessor methodValidationPostProcessor() {
       final MethodValidationPostProcessor methodValidationPostProcessor = new MethodValidationPostProcessor();
       methodValidationPostProcessor.setValidator(validator());
   
       return methodValidationPostProcessor;
   }
   
   @Bean
   public LocalValidatorFactoryBean validator() {
       final LocalValidatorFactoryBean localValidatorFactoryBean = new LocalValidatorFactoryBean();
   
       return localValidatorFactoryBean;
     }
   }
   

...

@Service
@Validated
public class SpringBarista extends Barista {

The part of the reference manual that talks about integration with JSR-303 conveniently omits these 2 crucial points without which BV does not kick in. This just caused me 6 hours of debugging and hair tearing where I did everything the doc said but BV would simply not kick in. I finally had to debug through the Spring source code to understand this. There got to be an easier way and I can't be the only one who had this problem. Created a JIRA SPR-11473 for them to update the doc.

Answer 2

For spring to validation to kick in the blend argument needs a @Valid annotation in front of it.

Your approach might not work since parameter contraints are not supported by the JSR303.

Constraint annotations can target any of the following ElementTypes:

FIELD for constrained attributes

METHOD for constrained getters

TYPE for constrained beans

ANNOTATION_TYPE for constraints composing other constraints

http://beanvalidation.org/1.0/spec/#constraintsdefinitionimplementation