Hello

I do the following operation with Spring 3.0 + Hibernate Validator 4.1.0:



Now here's the weird part: when e is transient, the saveOrUpdate operation validates e right away (fires a PreUpdateEvent) before creating it and not waiting for the transaction to commit. But when e is detached (thus updated to DB), Hibernate Validator is not called by PreUpdateEvent until the transaction ends, and thus the validation fails because e is no longer valid after doSomeCalculations(e)

This behavior is inconsistent and poses a problem for me. Why is Hibernate validating e immediately when it created but waiting for the transaction to commit when it is only persisted (updated)?

I need it to validate e right away, not when committing, whether creating or updating it..

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Posted this also at http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=107434 because i'm not sure where is the problem.

Hi,

if you want to control validation yourself it might be better to manually control the validation by using the Validator directly. I am not sure why exactly the behavior is as described, but it is in accordance w/ the spec. Here are some quotes from the persistence spec:





You can turn off automatic validation via setting javax.persistence.validation.mode to none. Or you can define which validation group should be targeted via the events using javax.persistence.validation.group.pre-[persist|update|remove]. Not sure whether this helps you, since it sill does not give any guarantee when the event is triggered.

--Hardy

Thank you Hardy

Can you refer me to some source that explains how to manually validate the entity?
The actual problem is that the entity is validated only at the end of the transaction, so even if I validate manually during the transaction, will it not be automatically validated again when committing?

Other solutions are quite complex, considering that otherwise entities validation works pretty well. If I turn off auto validation (suppose I create a special group for this entity) won't it mean I have to manually validate it on every place it's updated?

I do think that Hibernate Validator should be improved to provide some guarantee as for validation time. It's not uncommon to change entities during a transaction, so this behavior is expected to be consistent (or at least controllable).

--Yuval

Hi,

First of all I would turn off event based validation by setting javax.persistence.validation.mode to none. Then I would get hold of the ValidatorFactory and create my Validator directly from there. How you do that will depend on your framework. Given that you are using Spring I would assume that you can just get the factory of validator itself injected into your class.

--Hardy

Thanks, I can try that.

I had another idea: What if I persist / update e inside a nested transaction? If I understand the concept correctly that should force Hibernate Validator to validate e when committing the nested transaction at the latest, but still rollback if an exception occurs afterward in the parent transaction. Can this work? (I use Hibernate 3.6)

Yuval

Afaik there is no nested transaction support in Hibernate. So I am not sure what you have in mind.

--Hardy

Yeah, I started exploring that and quickly learned that there is no such support.

But I did find another simple 1-liner solution! Apparently flushing the session causes Hibernate Validator to validate the updated entity.
So I can just flush the session right after the update to e, without committing of course, and then get the validation on time.

Thank you for your help,
Yuval