Hibernate Validator is the reference implementation for the Bean Validation specification. For more information, see Hibernate Validator on hibernate.org.

We used to be very conservative on the constraints included in Hibernate Validator but we changed this policy recently and we would like to have more constraints built-in.

Of course, we won’t accept everything: the proposed constraints needs to be of general usage and well defined but the idea is to have more features in Hibernate Validator out of the box.

This post will be useful to those who have some interesting custom Bean Validation constraints and want to share them with the community.

There are a couple of nice benefits when constraints are part of Hibernate Validator rather than standalone ones:

  • All the Hibernate Validator users can benefit from these constraints. They are well documented and easy to find.

  • These constraints are maintained by the whole team and follow the evolution of Hibernate Validator.

  • They get Hibernate Validator Annotation Processor support. This annotation processor can scan classes during compilation and provide warnings/errors when constraint annotations are used inappropriately. This helps to spot possible problems at compilation and avoid runtime errors.

  • A programmatic constraint definition is available for constraints which are part of the engine.

  • Last but definitely not least, it becomes possible for such constraints to get additional required functionality on the engine level, such as Hibernate Validator’s ScriptEvaluator to evaluate a script which is required by @ScriptAssert and @ParameterScriptAssert, or some additional configuration property like the newly introduced temporalValidationTolerance which is used in temporal constraints when comparing temporal instances.

For the purposes of this post, a new constraint annotation to check if a given String is a valid ISBN will be created.

This very constraint has now been included into Hibernate Validator.

Step 1 - Add constraint annotation and validator

The first main step is to create the constraint itself with corresponding validators and register them in the engine.

Add constraint annotation

In order to do this, first a new constraint annotation should be created. In our case it will be called @ISBN and have one attribute of its own, type, which would define if the ISBN under inspection is ISBN 10 or ISBN 13.

/**
 * Checks that the annotated character sequence is a valid
 * <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number">ISBN</a>.
 * The length of the number and the check digit are both verified.
 * <p>
 * The supported type is {@code CharSequence}. {@code null} is considered valid.
 * <p>
 * During validation all non ISBN characters are ignored. All digits and 'X' are considered
 * to be valid ISBN characters. This is useful when validating ISBN with dashes separating
 * parts of the number (ex. {@code 978-161-729-045-9}).
 *
 * @author Marko Bekhta
 * @since 6.0.6
 */
@Documented
@Constraint(validatedBy = { })
@Target({ METHOD, FIELD, ANNOTATION_TYPE, CONSTRUCTOR, PARAMETER, TYPE_USE })
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Repeatable(List.class)
public @interface ISBN {
    String message() default "{org.hibernate.validator.constraints.ISBN.message}";

    Class<?>[] groups() default { };

    Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default { };

    Type type() default Type.ISBN13;

    /**
     * Defines several {@code @ISBN} annotations on the same element.
     */
    @Target({ METHOD, FIELD, ANNOTATION_TYPE, CONSTRUCTOR, PARAMETER, TYPE_USE })
    @Retention(RUNTIME)
    @Documented
    public @interface List {
        ISBN[] value();
    }

    /**
     * Defines the ISBN length. Valid lengths of ISBNs are {@code 10} and {@code 13}
     * which are represented as {@link Type#ISBN10} and {@link Type#ISBN13} correspondingly.
     */
    enum Type {
        ISBN10,
        ISBN13
    }
}

Looking at this code snippet, it is worth emphasizing the following:

  • An empty array as validatedBy parameter in @Constraint. There is no need to declare any validators here as they will be registered in the engine directly.

  • Key for default message is in the format {org.hibernate.validator.constraints.${nameOfConstraint}.message}, where ${nameOfConstraint} should be replaced with the same string as the name of constraint.

  • If applicable, a @Repeatable annotation should be defined.

  • New constraints are added to org.hibernate.validator.constraints package or its subpackages.

  • It is important to add a javadoc describing what kind of checks are performed by the constraint as well as to which types it is applicable.

  • A @since tag should specify the version in which we introduce the constraint.

Add constraint validator

Having the annotation in place, corresponding validators can now be implemented. ConstraintValidator interface should be implemented for each pair of constraint and applicable type. In case of @ISBN, it is only CharSequence. As this will be a constraint specific to Hibernate Validator, its validators should be placed in org.hibernate.validator.internal.constraintvalidators.hv package. A possible implementation for ISBNValidator can be the following:

public class ISBNValidator implements ConstraintValidator<ISBN, CharSequence> {

    /**
     * Pattern to replace all non ISBN characters. ISBN can have digits or 'X'.
     */
    private static Pattern NON_ISBN_CHARACTERS = Pattern.compile( "[^\\dX]" );

    private int length;

    private Function<String, Boolean> checkChecksumFunction;

    @Override
    public void initialize(ISBN constraintAnnotation) {
        switch ( constraintAnnotation.type() ) {
            case ISBN10:
                length = 10;
                checkChecksumFunction = this::checkChecksumISBN10;
                break;
            case ISBN13:
                length = 13;
                checkChecksumFunction = this::checkChecksumISBN13;
                break;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isValid(CharSequence isbn, ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
        if ( isbn == null ) {
            return true;
        }

        // Replace all non-digit (or !=X) chars
        String digits = NON_ISBN_CHARACTERS.matcher( isbn ).replaceAll( "" );

        // Check if the length of resulting string matches the expecting one
        if ( digits.length() != length ) {
            return false;
        }

        return checkChecksumFunction.apply( digits );
    }
    // check algorithm details are omitted here.
}

There is really no difference between constraint validators implemented as part of the engine, or the ones implemented outside of it. For more details on constraint validator implementation see the documentation.

Register the validator

Now that the validator implementation is in place, it should be registered somehow. When a constraint is part of the engine, there is no need to declare it in the validatedBy attribute or to use the ServiceLoader mechanism as described in this post. Instead it should be registered directly in the ConstraintHelper constructor by adding the following line:

putConstraint( tmpConstraints, ISBN.class, ISBNValidator.class );

It is preferred to keep these declarations of available validators in alphabetical order of constraints.

In the case of the ISBN example, there is only one validator, but it is also possible to register multiple ones for the same constraint, using the ConstraintHelper#putConstraints() method as follows:

putConstraints( tmpConstraints, ISBN.class, Arrays.asList(
        ISBNValidatorForCharacterSequence.class,
        ISBNValidatorForSomeOtherClass.class,
        ....
        ISBNValidatorForSomeAnotherClass.class
) );

You can see it in action here.

Add a default message to the resource bundle

Message keys in ValidationMessages.properties are kept in alphabetical order within groups. A default message (in English) must always be added:

org.hibernate.validator.constraints.Email.message   ...
org.hibernate.validator.constraints.ISBN.message    = invalid ISBN number
org.hibernate.validator.constraints.Length.message  ...

It is also much appreciated when a translation is added to other language files, if a reliable one can be provided but it’s definitely not something blocking for your constraint inclusion.

Test it all

There should be two kinds of tests added for a new constraint. First, all constraint validator implementations should be tested to make sure that the checks in them are giving the expected results. These tests are added to the org.hibernate.validator.test.internal.constraintvalidators.hv package. Both positive and negative scenarios should be present:

private ISBNValidator validator;

@BeforeMethod
public void setUp() throws Exception {
    validator = new ISBNValidator();
}

@Test
public void validISBN10() throws Exception {
    validator.initialize( initializeAnnotation( ISBN.Type.ISBN10 ) );

    assertValidISBN( null );
    assertValidISBN( "99921-58-10-7" );
    assertValidISBN( "9971-5-0210-0" );
    assertValidISBN( "960-425-059-0" );
    assertValidISBN( "0-9752298-0-X" );
    //... more positive cases
}

@Test
public void invalidISBN10() throws Exception {
    validator.initialize( initializeAnnotation( ISBN.Type.ISBN10 ) );

    // invalid check-digit
    assertInvalidISBN( "99921-58-10-8" );
    assertInvalidISBN( "9971-5-0210-1" );
    assertInvalidISBN( "960-425-059-2" );
    assertInvalidISBN( "80-902734-1-8" );
    // ... more negative cases

    // invalid length
    assertInvalidISBN( "" );
    assertInvalidISBN( "978-0-5" );
    assertInvalidISBN( "978-0-55555555555555" );
    // ... more negative cases
}

private ISBN initializeAnnotation(ISBN.Type type) {
    ConstraintAnnotationDescriptor.Builder<ISBN> descriptorBuilder = new ConstraintAnnotationDescriptor.Builder<>( ISBN.class );
    descriptorBuilder.setAttribute( "type", type );
    return descriptorBuilder.build().getAnnotation();
}

Because the @ISBN constraint has a type attribute, behavior of which should be tested, and because ConstraintValidator requires an annotation to be passed to the initialize() method, the ConstraintAnnotationDescriptor.Builder can be used to create an annotation proxy, as shown in the initializeAnnotation() method of the above example.

These tests ensure that the validators work correctly. But it is also required to make sure that the new constraint and its validators are registered and picked up by the engine. This second kind of tests is added to the org.hibernate.validator.test.constraints.annotations.hv package and is extended from AbstractConstrainedTest. A simple bean with the new constraint applied to the allowed types and at the allowed places (field/method return value/etc.) should be added as a private static class of that test. And the Validator#validate() method should be called with the instance of such bean as parameter, to make sure that new constraint works.

An example of such test for the @ISBN constraint can be as follows:

public class ISBNConstrainedTest extends AbstractConstrainedTest {

    @Test
    public void testISBN() {
        Foo foo = new Foo( "978-1-56619-909-4" );
        Set<ConstraintViolation<Foo>> violations = validator.validate( foo );
        assertNoViolations( violations );
    }

    @Test
    public void testISBNInvalid() {
        Foo foo = new Foo( "5412-3456-7890" );
        Set<ConstraintViolation<Foo>> violations = validator.validate( foo );
        assertThat( violations ).containsOnlyViolations(
                violationOf( ISBN.class ).withMessage( "invalid ISBN number" )
        );
    }

    private static class Foo {
        @ISBN
        private final String number;

        public Foo(String number) {
            this.number = number;
        }
    }
}

To make assertions on constraint violations, the ConstraintViolationAssert assertion class is used. It includes ConstraintViolationAssert#assertNoViolations() which will check that the passed set of constraint violations is empty.

It also has a ConstraintViolationAssert#assertThat() method which receives a set of violations and returns a ConstraintViolationSetAssert which provides a rich API to perform assertions on violations.

For the purposes of the ConstrainedTest, it is enough to check that the expected violations are present with the expected message (see ISBNConstrainedTest#testISBNInvalid() above).

Preferably, a @TestForIssue annotation should be added to all tests written for a constraint. This annotation can either be applied to a test method or to a test class. It has just one parameter - jiraKey which helps to link back a test to a corresponding JIRA ticket (for example @TestForIssue(jiraKey = "HV-{number}") where {number} is the number of the corresponding JIRA ticket).

Step 2 - Add programmatic definition

The second main step is to add a programmatic definition for a new constraint. The definition itself is added to the org.hibernate.validator.cfg.defs package. It should extend ConstraintDef and provide methods which allow to specify all the constraint-specific attributes:

public class ISBNDef extends ConstraintDef<ISBNDef, ISBN> {

    public ISBNDef() {
        super( ISBN.class );
    }

    public ISBNDef type(ISBN.Type type) {
        addParameter( "type", type );
        return this;
    }
}

The names of the methods in YourConstraintDef should match the names of the corresponding annotation attributes. The methods should also allow chaining so that constraint definition can be initialized in one go, hence they should return this.

The programmatic definition should also be tested. Based on its complexity and the amount of tests needed, they can either be included into the validator test class (in case of the ISBN example - into ISBNValidatorTest) or have their own test class within the same package.

A simple programmatic constraint test requires a bean to which new constraint can be applied and a test applying it:

@Test
public void testProgrammaticDefinition() throws Exception {
    HibernateValidatorConfiguration config = getConfiguration( HibernateValidator.class );
    ConstraintMapping mapping = config.createConstraintMapping();
    mapping.type( Book.class )
            .property( "isbn", FIELD )
            .constraint( new ISBNDef().type( ISBN.Type.ISBN13 ) );
    config.addMapping( mapping );
    Validator validator = config.buildValidatorFactory().getValidator();

    Set<ConstraintViolation<Book>> constraintViolations = validator.validate( new Book( "978-0-54560-495-6" ) );
    assertNoViolations( constraintViolations );

    constraintViolations = validator.validate( new Book( "978-0-54560-495-7" ) );
    assertThat( constraintViolations ).containsOnlyViolations(
            violationOf( ISBN.class )
    );
}

private static class Book {

    private final String isbn;

    private Book(String isbn) {
        this.isbn = isbn;
    }
}

Step 3 - Add annotation processor support

In the third step, a new constraint should also be registered within the annotation processor types:

  • First, the new constraint should be added to TypeNames.HibernateValidatorTypes in alphabetical order:

public static final String EMAIL = ....
public static final String ISBN = ORG_HIBERNATE_VALIDATOR_CONSTRAINTS + ".ISBN";
public static final String LENGTH = ....
  • Then this constraint, together with all types to which it can be applied, should be registered in ConstraintHelper constructor of the annotation processor:

registerAllowedTypesForBuiltInConstraint( HibernateValidatorTypes.EMAIL, ....
registerAllowedTypesForBuiltInConstraint( HibernateValidatorTypes.ISBN, CharSequence.class );
registerAllowedTypesForBuiltInConstraint( HibernateValidatorTypes.LENGTH, ....
  • To make sure that constraint is registered correctly, a simple test should be added to ConstraintValidationProcessorTest:

/**
 * Simple bean that has both correct and incorrect usages of ISBN constraint.
 */
public class ModelWithISBNConstraints {
    @ISBN private String string;
    @ISBN private CharSequence charSequence;
    @ISBN private Integer integer;
}

public class ConstraintValidationProcessorTest extends ConstraintValidationProcessorTestBase {
    // ...

    @Test
    public void isbnConstraints() {
        File[] sourceFiles = new File[] {
                compilerHelper.getSourceFile( ModelWithISBNConstraints.class )
        };

        boolean compilationResult =
                compilerHelper.compile( new ConstraintValidationProcessor(), diagnostics, false, true, sourceFiles );

        assertFalse( compilationResult );
        assertThatDiagnosticsMatch(
                diagnostics,
                new DiagnosticExpectation( Kind.ERROR, 22 )
        );
    }
}

Step 4 - Add documentation

Finally, to finish adding a new constraint to Hibernate Validator, documentation for this constraint should be added to the reference guide.

A new list item should be added in the second chapter under Additional constraints, similar to the following one:

`@ISBN`:: Checks that the annotated character sequence is a valid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number[ISBN]. `type` determines the type of ISBN. The default is ISBN-13.
    Supported data types::: `CharSequence`
    Hibernate metadata impact::: None

It should describe the purpose of the constraint, what can be specified by constraint attributes, and to which types it can be applied. List of additional constraints is ordered alphabetically.

Conclusion

The complete code used throughout this post as an example is available on Github.

This post provided step by step instructions for adding a new constraint to Hibernate Validator:

  • Step 1 - Add constraint annotation and validator - commit

  • Step 2 - Add programmatic definition - commit

  • Step 3 - Add annotation processor support - commit

  • Step 4 - Add documentation - commit

One more thing, not mentioned in the post. Although this isn’t strictly necessary, it is recommended discussing the addition of new constraints before jumping right to their implementation. The discussion could be carried out either at our JIRA (in a new ticket created for the specific constraint in mind) or via the mailing list.

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