I just discovered a subtle bug in my application after upgrading to Hibernate Validator 6 and replacing my deprecated annotations from org.hibernate.validator.constraints with their counterparts in javax.validation.constraints.

The deprecated annotations packaged with HV were annotated with @NotNull. E.g.





The new annotations do not include the @NotNull annotation. Is there a reason for this?

I'm currently scanning my entities for fields with @NotNull (or implied @NotNull) to mark those fields as required in my UI. This does not work anymore after the upgrade. Now I have to either scan for @NotNull, @NotEmpty, and @NotBlank or create my own composite annotations to maintain the current behavior. What is the recommended approach for this?

Thanks,

Thomas

When promoting @NotEmpty and @NotBlank from HV to the Bean Validation spec we decided to define them as composed constraints (as their previous counterparts), but instead leave this as an implementation detail to BV providers. The reason being, that the implementation can be more efficient when using a single constraint validator instead of relying on constraint composition.

So you'd indeed have to expand your scan to look for @NotNull, @NotEmpty and @NotBlank.

--Gunnar

Gunnar, thanks for clarifying! I'll adjust the scanning logic accordingly.