hi guys, i have a field that have two validation annotations


i am just curious to know how hibernate is specifying the order of which validation annotation to be executed first, and if it's possible to custom that ?

the reason i am asking is that if i left that field empty sometimes the first validation message displayed is for not empty and other times if i left it empty i get the validation message for the length annotation.

thanks in advance.

I am not much familiar with this. but i was trying to search for your query and look what i have found :)

If no groups are specified a constraint is part of the Default Bean Validation group (see: javax.validation.groups.Default).

Create an interface to be your "Extended" (or whatever you want to call it) group:

public interface Extended{}

Now create an interface that will have the javax.validation.GroupSequence annotation.

@GroupSequence({Default.class, Extended.class})
public interface MySequence {}

Set the validation groups on your constraints

@NotEmpty // If no group is specified it is part of the default group
@Length(min=3,max=100, groups = Extended.class)
String firstName;

Pass MySequence to your validator call.

validator.validate(object, MySequence.class);

As specified by your @GroupSequence the default constraints will be validated first and if no contraint violations are encountered it will move on to the extended group.

Hi,

As the Bean Validation specification says (Hibernate Validator is the Reference Implementation) the constraints are evaluated in no particular order (see section 3.4.2 of the specification). However, it's possible to specify an order of evaluation. To achieve that, you have to work with GroupSequence and groups as says hillaryjohnson (a GroupSequence defines a list of groups which have to be evaluated in the specified order and a bit more :).

There is an example in the HV doc about this (http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/validator/4.2/reference/en-US/html_single/#d0e974).

Hope this help.

--Kevin

Hi,

as mentioned before, if you want to enforce an order you have to use a group sequence.
And just as a reminder, the Java reflection API does not give you any information about the order in which you specify annotations. You can just find out which annotations are places on a method/field not in which order.

--Hardy