spring Spring JSR 303 Bean Validation JSR303 Annotation based validations in Springs examples

Example

Add any JSR 303 implementation to your classpath. Popular one used is Hibernate validator from Hibernate.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-validator</artifactId>
    <version>4.2.0.Final</version>
</dependency>

Lets say the there is a rest api to create user in the system

@RequestMapping(value="/registeruser", method=RequestMethod.POST)
public String registerUser(User user);

The input json sample would look like as below

{"username" : "[email protected]", "password" : "password1", "password2":"password1"}

User.java

public class User {

    private String username;
    private String password;
    private String password2;

    getXXX and setXXX

}

We can define JSR 303 validations on User Class as below.

public class User {

    @NotEmpty
    @Size(min=5)
    @Email
    private String username;
    
    @NotEmpty
    private String password;
    
    @NotEmpty
    private String password2;

}

We may also need to have a business validator like password and password2(confirm password) are same, for this we can add a custom validator as below. Write a custom annotation for annotating the data field.

@Target({ ElementType.FIELD })
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = PasswordValidator.class)
public @interface GoodPassword {
    String message() default "Passwords wont match.";
    Class<?>[] groups() default {};
    Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default {};
}

Write a Validator class for applying Validation logic.

public class PastValidator implements ConstraintValidator<GoodPassword, User> {
    @Override
    public void initialize(GoodPassword annotation) {}
    
    @Override
    public boolean isValid(User user, ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
        return user.getPassword().equals(user.getPassword2());
    }
}

Adding this validation to User Class

@GoodPassword
public class User {

    @NotEmpty
    @Size(min=5)
    @Email
    private String username;
    
    @NotEmpty
    private String password;
    
    @NotEmpty
    private String password2;
}

@Valid triggers validation in Spring. BindingResult is an object injected by spring which has list of errors after validation.

public String registerUser(@Valid User user, BindingResult result);

JSR 303 annotation has message attributes on them which can be used for providing custom messages.

@GoodPassword
public class User {

    @NotEmpty(message="Username Cant be empty")
    @Size(min=5, message="Username cant be les than 5 chars")
    @Email(message="Should be in email format")
    private String username;
    
    @NotEmpty(message="Password cant be empty")
    private String password;
    
    @NotEmpty(message="Password2 cant be empty")
    private String password2;

}