Prerequisite for @Valid-annotated member?

[haetti]

Hi everybody

I have a validation issue that I think is not that uncommon, but yet I was not able to find any solutions for that.

I have something like the following class:

public class Contract { private boolean cancelled; @Valid private Partnership partnership; }

The partnership contains multiple persons, which also contain several other classes that all have different @Valid-annotations.

Now, if I validate such a contract, the partnership will always be validated. But I only need to validate its partnership, if the contract itself ist not cancelled. It would be great, if @Valid would offer a prerequisite property like that

`
public class Contract {
private boolean cancelled;
@Valid(prerequisite = "shouldValidate")
private Partnership partnership;

public boolean shouldValidate() {
	return !cancelled;
}

}
`

Since there is no such possibility, I wrote a custom ConstraintValidator.

`
@ApplicationScoped
public class ValidateIfNotCancelledValidator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidateIfNotCancelled, Contract> {

@Override
public boolean isValid(Contract contract, ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
    if (contract == null || contract.isCancelled()) {
        return true;
    }

    // validate the partnership here
}

}
`

I do not want to write the validation for the partnership manually. So I need the validator here and also the validation group that the current validation runs with. I wrote some code that actually works, but seems very ugly to me. I guess it is not recommended to do this.

`
@dependent
public class ValidateIfNotCancelledValidator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidateIfNotCancelled, Contract> {

private Class<?>[] groups;

@Inject
Provider<Validator> validatorProvider;

@Override
public void initialize(ValidateIfNotCancelled constraintAnnotation) {
    groups = constraintAnnotation.groups();
}

@Override
public boolean isValid(Contract contract, ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
    if (contract == null || contract.isCancelled()) {
        return true;
    }

    Partnership partnership = contract.getPartnership();
    Set<ConstraintViolation<Partnership>> violations = validatorProvider.get().validate(partnership, groups);
    if (!violations.isEmpty()) {
        context.disableDefaultConstraintViolation();
        violations.forEach(violation -> context
                .buildConstraintViolationWithTemplate(violation.getMessage())
                .addPropertyNode("partnership")
                .addConstraintViolation());
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}

}
`

Now I have to annotate Contract several times for each validation-group I want. That seems quite ugly.

@ValidateIfNotCancelled(groups = PreValidation.class) @ValidateIfNotCancelled(groups = ForSave.class) @ValidateIfNotCancelled(groups = Complete.class) public class Contract { // ... }

And I access the validator within a validation. This seems wrong to me, too. But it's the only way it worked somehow.

I found a discussion with the same issue on https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/how-can-i-retrieve-current-validation-contexts-groups-in-a-validator/414. It has been 7 years now without any solutions yet. In the community here, I haven't found anything like that.

Is there a better way to do this? I guess, customizing the Validator as described on https://quarkus.io/guides/validation#hibernate-validator-extension-and-cdi does not help.

Thank you so much for your support!