In http://stackoverflow.com/q/13477431/131929 I asked why a JUnit test doesn't fail if the size constraint in @Column is violated. I was told that Bean Validators ignore JPA entities. I find that odd. Why is that so?

It's not right that Bean Validation ignores JPA entities. If you put Bean Validation constraint annotations (@Size, @Pattern etc.) to a JPA entity and you validate this entity (e.g. automatically upon persisting the entity) these constraints will be validated.

But Bean Validation doesn't examine any other annotations such as JPA's @Column. The goal of the Bean Validation spec is to define a generic validation solution to be used in all application layers, be it frontend or backend. Therefore it isn't aware of annotations specific to one application layer or technology such as JPA.

Hth,

--Gunnar

Thanks for the explanation, makes sense now.



Sorry, my bad...I meant to write "JPA annotations" instead of "JPA entities".