Although I've seen several similar topics posted, the best-practice solution still isn't clear to me.

My use-case:

I'm using a JDBC helper library to persist some large objects whose class definitions were generated by Hibernate Tools from an existing database.


What I'd like to do:

At the application-level, I'd like to use Hibernate Validator to validate the objects using the validation constraints generated by Hibernate Tools.


Problem:

Hibernate Tools seems to only generate @Column annotations for the class properties, which don't appear to be recognized by Hibernate Validator as validation constraints.


Questions:

1. Should I create my own custom Hibernate Validator constraint handler for the @Column annotation?

2. Is there a way to get Hibernate Tools to generate Hibernate Validator-style constraints?

3. Am I totally missing something?


Thank you.

- Jim

technically speaking you cannot do 1.
I don't know if tools allow 2, that could be a nice add on