Should validators in spring access the database?

java, spring, spring-mvc, validation

Solution

Well your validators are just spring beans, right, so they can be injected with the service objects that handle data access. You can have your validators get data from the database without compromising the design.

Problem

I'm not really sure if it's a good design decision to make the validators validate commands based on the state of the database. For example if I need to validate a User bean besides checking if the email and username are empty etc. I also need to reject values if they are already used. Should this kind of logic go in the validators or the service objects?

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