Vaildation not Firing with Oracle 11g and SequenceGenerator

bootlaces · **Joined:** Fri Apr 09, 2010 3:55 pm **Posts:** 8

Hi,

Using Oracle 11.2.0.1.0.
Java 1.6 u25
Hibernate Validator 4.2.0.Beta2 (but problem also occurs on 4.1.0.Final)
Hibernate 3.6.4.Final.

Right, here we go:

Here is a snippet of code:

Code:

@SequenceGenerator(name = "articleseq", sequenceName = "articleseq", allocationSize = 1)
public class Article extends AbstractModel {

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 3154322570848739695L;

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO, generator = "articleseq")
    private Long id;

    @NotEmpty
    @Length(max = 256)
    private String headline;

    @Valid
    @NotNull
    @Cascade(org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.SAVE_UPDATE)
    @ManyToOne(cascade = {CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE, CascadeType.REFRESH})
    private Channel channel;
}

Here is a test case:

Code:

    @Test
    public void articleWithNullChannelIdShouldBeInvalid() {
        thrown.expect(ConstraintViolationException.class);
        thrown.expectMessage("Channel cannot be empty!");
        article.setChannel(null);
        articleDao.save(article);
    }

    @Test
    public void articleWithEmptyHeadlineShouldBeInvalid() {
        thrown.expect(ConstraintViolationException.class);
        thrown.expectMessage("Headline cannot be empty!");
        article.setHeadline(null);
        articleDao.save(article);
    }

What is happening is that the org.hibernate.validator.contraints.impl.NotNullValidator is NOT being fired, thus the ExpectedException in each unit test is failing.

If I look at my trace, I see that Hibernate is requesting sequence values from Oracle and the Entity (Article) is being assigned an id, thus it is being persisted to the database.

If I change the @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO, generator = "articleseq") to @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) then the NotNullValidator fires and the Unit Tests pass successfully.

We can't use IDENTITY here since we have other processes that could update the database, so we have to rely on Oracle offering us primary keys.

I really don't understand why the Validation is not firing - anyone have any information why?

Thank you so much :-)

-=david=-

sanne.grinovero · **Posted:** Fri Jun 03, 2011 2:21 pm

Quote:

If I look at my trace, I see that Hibernate is requesting sequence values from Oracle and the Entity (Article) is being assigned an id, thus it is being persisted to the database.

I wouldn't be so sure of that: as soon as an entity is attached to the session (like when you persist a new object), then a primary key must be assigned to it, but Hibernate will not actually flush the entity to the database until as late as possible: you might always want to change some more values before the transaction commits, or maybe you won't commit it at all.

So when IDENTITY is being used, to assign an identifier it's forced to write (and so to validate) to the entity table, but if a sequence is being used then it's good enough to get a sequence value from the database, it doesn't need yet to actually store the value (flush the persistence context).

I'm confident it will validate the object at transaction commit, which I don't see here.

bootlaces · **Joined:** Fri Apr 09, 2010 3:55 pm **Posts:** 8

Hi!

Thank you *so* much for your reply. It makes sense. I really appreciate it :-) I'll have to rethink my transactional boundaries so that before my unit tests finish, that I get the transaction to commit so that Hibernate Validator fires for me.

Grazie tanto :-) sei molto gentile :-)

-=david=-

sanne.grinovero · **Posted:** Sat Jun 04, 2011 10:16 am

Prego!