Adding constraint violation manually

Question

Is it possible to add constraint violation manually?

E.g.:

// validate customer (using validation annotations)
Set<ConstraintViolation<Customer>> violations = validator.validate(customer);

if (someSpecialCase) {
    violations.add(..) 
}

The problem is the add method accepts a ConstraintViolation interface but the javax.validation package contains no implementors that can be used.

Any idea?

Which package are you using? This is not in standard java. – Peter Lawrey May 18 '14 at 19:05 — Peter Lawrey, May 18 '14 at 19:05

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '14 at 21:41

I believe that you're using Hibernate validators for this.

If that's the case, then depending on the special case you have, you would want to write a custom class-level validator for a Customer instead, and let it be captured in the set of constraint violations.

Since I don't know what your Customer bean looks like, I can only at best offer you a general direction on this approach.

// Annotation
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Constraint(validatedBy = CustomerValidator.class)
public @interface ValidCustomer {
    String message() default "Invalid customer (due to edge case)";
    Class<?>[] groups() default { };
    Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default { };
}

// Validator

public class CustomerValidator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidCustomer, Customer> {

    @Override
    public void initialize(final ValidCustomer constraintAnnotation) {

    }

    @Override
    public boolean isValid(final Customer value,
                           final ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
        // logic for validation according to your edge case
    }
}

You would then annotate your Customer class with this validator.

@ValidCustomer
public class Customer {
    // ...
}

After this, your specific constraint will be captured in violations.

Yes I understand I can add custom validations like this. What I want to achieve is that a particular field of my entity cannot be updated once created. The validation framework has no notion that it is a context of updating. Any suggestions? — Marcel Overdijk, May 19 '14 at 17:46

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

3

The short answer is: "No, there is no way to manually add constraint violations".

To elaborate a little bit. As you say, all classes involved are interfaces. If you really think you want to do it, you could implement your custom ConstraintViolationImpl. However, I am wondering what your actual use case is? Why do you want to add a constraint violation without validation? As the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/23727169/115835 suggest, you could always go via a class level custom constraint. As part of isValid in your custom ConstraintValidator implementation, you get an ConstraintValidatorContext which will allow you to add additional constraint violations.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

Community

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answered May 19 '14 at 09:06

Hardy

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OK, basically what I want to do is make some field not-updateable. So based on the REST action (create vs. update) this validation should happen or not. – Marcel Overdijk May 19 '14 at 13:09
@MarcelOverdijk, then you should take a look at validation groups. – mneri Dec 10 '19 at 10:23

Adding constraint violation manually

2 Answers2