Hello all,

I currently have a form bean with attributes that I are annotated with validation annotations and I can successfully validate
form submissions. However I have a requirement to be able to toggle validation on or off for any of the form fields dynamically.
I am looking for an nice way to do this but it seems that the validation groups approach is not applicable, that those groups would
need to be defined at compile time. I need some type of dynamic approach where I can perhaps pass a list of the attributes of the
form that I want validated according to the validation annotations in the form bean class.

Any help is very much appreciated.

Regards

You could implement a custom default group sequence provider (see https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/validator/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-default-group-class) which determines the groups to validate based on the state of your entity.

Hth,

--Gunnar

Thank you Gunnar,
Very much appreciated. I have had a look into this approach but unfortunately I think that the GroupSequenceProvider won't be suitable for what I need. As every field can change and the form has many fields that may not be grouped. I would need to provide a GroupSequence for every field in the form. There is also a requirement for a content editor to be able to dynamically update form fields and associate validation constraints per field so it maybe the case that hibernate validation is not a good fit for these requirements.

I think that I need to somehow do the following :

* For each field in a form enable a a CMS editor be able to associate constraints for example
Field A - constraint 1 .. n (name and constraint stored in CMS)

* On form submission - Form processor gets all parameter names from the request and looks up the associated constraints to create a dynamic constraint map {(field a, (constraint1, constraint 2)), (field b, (constraint 1, constraint 3 ) ...}

* Form parameters are bound to a bean which is then validated against the constraint map.

Regards

In this case the API for programmatic constraint declaration (https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/validator/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-programmatic-api) may be a solution for you. Based on the configuration stored in the CMS you'd configure the constraints applying to your types and bootstrap a ValidatorFactory using that configuration. You should cache it somewhere as its creation is costly. Then when your CMS configuration changes, i.e. additional constraints have been set up etc. - you'd re-create the ValidatorFactory.

Hth,

--Gunnar

I will give this approach a try and report back.

Thanks again