I use Validator 4.1.0 with annotations together with hibernate. I realized that the validation events only get fired when I save or update the entity in question.

However, in the following scenario the validation events don't fire:

EntityA is associated by means of a collection to EntityB as follows:



The @Size(min = 1) annotation only is considered when I save/update EntityA directly. But when I call



the validation event does not get fired. It get's fired however when I call session.save(entityA);.

Is there a way to fire the event without the unnecessary call to save()?

Conny

Have you tried to modify your cascade types? Try CascadeType.ALL or at least add CascadeType.REMOVE

--Hardy

I tried it. But it does not lead to the desired outcome.

I've also just realized, that it is not the session.save(entityA) that triggers the validation but the change of some other property of entityA (in my case a String property). The save() is actually unnecessary. It is necessary, however, to modify some simple attributes of the entity in order to trigger the validation of the association.

So I restate my question: can the validation of the collection be achieved without modifying the entity in some other way?

Looking at BeanValidationEventListener



there is no validation on collection change events. I think the reason is that JPA only defines the Bean Validation callbacks for these entity changes. Hibernate also has for example a PreCollectionUpdateEvent. You could just write your own event listener (maybe even extending BeanValidationEventListener) and handle collection change events as well.
You could also create a Jira for this. It seems to make sense to add this listeners as well, but of course this has to be compliant with the spec. Maybe some sort of option would make sense here.

--Hardy