JSR-303 bean validation with Spring does not kick in

Question

I've configured a JSR-303 custom validator following what's given in the docs (http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/4.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/validation.html), complete with LocalValidatorFactoryBean and Hibernate validator on the classpath. However, my validator just refuses to kick in. I've put up a dirt simple test project here (https://github.com/abhijitsarkar/java/tree/master/spring-jsr-303), along with a failing unit test. Should you decide to take a look, just clone it and run `gradlew clean test` from the root directory. I'm using Spring framework 4.0.2.RELEASE and Hibernate validator 5.0.3.Final. Method under validation: ``` public Coffee serve(@ValidOrder(Coffee.Blend.class) final String blend) { ``` ValidOrder annotation: ``` @Documented @Constraint(validatedBy = {OrderValidator.class}) @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @Target({ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.FIELD, ElementType.ANNOTATION_TYPE, ElementType.CONSTRUCTOR, ElementType.PARAMETER}) @NotNull public @in…

Accepted Answer

- A MethodValidationPostProcessor needs to be configured in addition to the LocalValidatorFactoryBean.

The class to be validated must have a `@Validated` annotation on it else methods are NOT searched for inline constraint annotations.

```
@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackageClasses = {SpringPackageComponentScanMarker.class})
@EnableAspectJAutoProxy
public abstract class AppConfig {

@Bean
public MethodValidationPostProcessor methodValidationPostProcessor() {
    final MethodValidationPostProcessor methodValidationPostProcessor = new MethodValidationPostProcessor();
    methodValidationPostProcessor.setValidator(validator());

return methodValidationPostProcessor;
}

@Bean
public LocalValidatorFactoryBean validator() {
    final LocalValidatorFactoryBean localValidatorFactoryBean = new LocalValidatorFactoryBean();

return localValidatorFactoryBean;
  }
}
```

...

```
@Service
@Validated
public class SpringBarista extends Barista {
```

The part of the reference manual that talks about integration with JSR-303 conveniently omits these 2 crucial points without which BV does not kick in. This just caused me 6 hours of debugging and hair tearing where I did everything the doc said but BV would simply not kick in. I finally had to debug through the Spring source code to understand this. There got to be an easier way and I can't be the only one who had this problem. Created a JIRA SPR-11473 for them to update the doc.

JSR-303 bean validation with Spring does not kick in

Solution

Problem