hi

suppose i have a group of 3 fields, tel1 tel2 tel3, and i want to validate that at least one of them is @NotEmpty, but not necessarily all of them.
is there a way for me to do it without writing my own custom validation annotation?

thanks.

Not without only using Bean Validation specific constraints. However, Hibernate Validator contains a @ScriptAssert annotation with which you can achieve what you want.

thanks, i understand that this is a rather new annotation from Hibernate Validator 4.1.0, i will look into it.

Right. It was introduced into 4.1.x. It requires the availability of a scripting engine, but with Java 6 a Javascript engine is included.
If you don't want to use @ScriptAssert you would have to write a custom class level constraint.

--Hardy