How can I generate Java objects with Bean Validation annotations from an XSD?

Question

I'm writing an EJB as a contract first SOAP service and I generate the java classes and SEI from the WSDL. The WSDL specifies several types with constraints (max length, pattern, etc). The generated java classes are JAXB annotated but lack the contraints metadata because the JAXB annotations don't support those. This means that input validation only occurs when the service is called through the SOAP endpoint.

The problem is that when the EJB is called by another EJB the validation is bypassed since it is located in the XML stack. I would like to disable XML Schemavalidation and use Bean Validation instead so validation works for both ways (SOAP and RMI) of calling the EJB.

Question: How can I generate not only JAXB annotations but also Bean Validation annotations on the Java classes?

Answer 1

You can use the javax.xml.valdation APIs to validation a domain model mapped with JAXB against an XML schema. An advantage of this approach is that you use the same validation rules (defined in the XML schema) for both of your use cases:

import java.io.File;
import javax.xml.XMLConstants;
import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.util.JAXBSource;
import javax.xml.validation.*;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Customer customer = new Customer();
        customer.setName("Jane Doe");
        customer.getPhoneNumbers().add(new PhoneNumber());
        customer.getPhoneNumbers().add(new PhoneNumber());
        customer.getPhoneNumbers().add(new PhoneNumber());

        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customer.class);
        JAXBSource source = new JAXBSource(jc, customer);

        SchemaFactory sf = SchemaFactory.newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI);
        Schema schema = sf.newSchema(new File("customer.xsd"));

        Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
        validator.setErrorHandler(new MyErrorHandler());
        validator.validate(source);
    }

}

Full Example

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2010/11/validate-jaxb-object-model-with-xml.html