Hi,

from what I've read, I can't figure anything better than adding a log.error(validationMessages[i]) in each of the creating/modifying methods.

OK, there's not much of them at the lowest DAO level, but still it'd be nice to have a declarative way to trigger the validation messages display.

An aspect could probably do, but it'd be better if included with the validation package itself.
Is there anything coming concerning the issue?

cheers,

You mean displaying the message to the user in a UI? Seam does that through a JSF tag, it smartly replace the validators of JSF and put messages through the Faces messages.
What do you have in mind exactly?

no I just mean for the developers to have a way of understanding what is going on.
Because it's a hell of a job to determine where the validation error comes from on big objects and it's also quite not nice to add code to all methods for them to display explicit validation error messages.

I just wish could write the code to display the validationMessages in a single method, and not to have to add anything to the try catch of my create/update DAO methods. This is what I meant by declaratively.

I think that should belong to the HibernateValidation package itself. I'm thinking of something like an annotation -- @DisplayValidationError or even better a config in a XML file with pointcut like syntax. (Display error messages in logs for all DAO level methods which name starts with create* or update*)

Traditionally that's the job of the upper most layer to handle and display the exception accordingly.
If using a servlet, you could have a filter that display the exception with the full details (ie having the knowledge of the Validator exception).

In my case I don't use Hibernate validator to handle upper level validation. The latter is implemented elsewhere.

I find it useful as a way to enforce my entities well-formedness, to avoid database exception and to document some constraint that would previously only be implemented in the database layer.
I don't use Seam, I don't use JSF, I can't use Validator as a upper layer validation.

It's kind of last resort validation for uncatched mistakes at development time and to track errors on server side created object (those that don't go through upper layer validation).

My app users should never Validator exception, only developers.

That's maybe not what you envision for you lib usage :-)
But that's the way I use it, and I actually find it pretty convenient.

Let me rephrase, you can implement this exception and log handling in the upper most layer in your system: this layer can be your server side boundaries or your UI, this is not relevant.

And you're correct, I think that's not the job of a library.