Hello all,

I'm working on a project with Hibernate Validator and form submissions. What I'm trying to do is set up a way to progressively validate each form field, where the fields represent properties on an entity, with the validator. My current attempts use the validator's getPotentialInvalidValues() method, but as the comments on the method say, it won't do nesting.

My current implementation passes the beanpath to the field being validated and the value in the input to a servlet where I have a ClassValidator for the type that the form represents. This works fine for simple properties like foo.emailAddress, but like I said before, something like foo.x.y.z fails entirely.

I can always do something like instantiate an object of type foo and validate the entire class, then prune out all the InvalidValues that I'm not currently concerned about, but this seems like a roundabout way to do it.

Another way would be to parse the beanpath myself and use reflection to get the types of each path so I can create the correct ClassValidator, in essence doing the nesting that getPotentialInvalidValues currently doesn't.

Does anybody have any advice regarding my plight?

Hi,

I think the answer to your plights is Bean Validation (JSR 303). We are currently implementing a reference implementation of this spec and will shortly release an alpha version of this framework. In fact this implementation will replace the current Hibernate Validator. The Bean Validation specification will support recursive properties checking. See also - http://hibernate.org/459.html

In case you cannot wait I guess you could work with your proposed workaround or contribute a recursive implementation for the exiting Hibernate Validator code.

--Hardy