Is there a standard way to enable JSR 303 Bean Validation using annotated method arguments

Question

I've been looking a around for a while now with no luck. I'n not using Spring MVC but still want to use @javax.validation.Valid to enable validation of method arguments. To give an example

public class EventServiceImpl implements IEventService {
    @Override
    public void invite(@Valid Event event, @Valid User user) { ... }
}

Using MVC, this is enabled for @Controller annotated beans with a simple <mvc:annotation-driven/> (see 5.7.4.3 Configuring a JSR-303 Validator for use by Spring MVC).

Using AOP should be quite trivial. Nevertheless, I suspect there's some standard way to do this. Hence the question: Is there a similar thing for non-MVC applications and non-controller beans to enable input validation for annotated beans?

Answer 1

Method level validation is not part of the Bean Validation specification (JSR 303). Method level validation is a suggestion in the spec added in appendix C.

Hibernate Validator 4.2 (a beta is out already) is implementing this suggestion and allows to place JSR 303 annotations on method parameters and return values. Of course you will still need some Spring glue code, but that should not be too hard.

Also Bean Validation 1.1 will add method level validation officially to the spec (not just as appendix/recommendation). See also http://beanvalidation.org/