Using hibernate validator JodaTime bean validation constraints in JBoss

Question

We have an enterprise application that uses the Joda DateTime library. The application is deployed into a JBoss 7.2.0 Alpha1 Container. Some classes in our domain model have @Past annotations on fields of type DateTime. In order to validate these constraints we'd like to use the constraint validators provided by hibernate-validator. Therefore we added a dependency 'org.hibernate.validator' to the MANIFEST.MF of our ear file. We are using version 2.0 of the Joda library. Therefore we have packaged the joda-time-2.0.jar file in our ear. We are not using the version 1.6.2 that is available as a module of JBoss 7

When validating an object with a DateTime field following exception is thrown:

10:51:41,140 ERROR [org.acme.GlobalExceptionHandler] (EJB default - 10) Exception caught by global exception handler: javax.validation.UnexpectedTypeException: No validator could be found for type: org.joda.time.DateTime
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintTree.verifyResolveWasUnique(ConstraintTree.java:383) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintTree.findMatchingValidatorClass(ConstraintTree.java:364) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintTree.getInitializedValidator(ConstraintTree.java:313) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintTree.validateConstraints(ConstraintTree.java:144) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ConstraintTree.validateConstraints(ConstraintTree.java:117) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.metadata.MetaConstraint.validateConstraint(MetaConstraint.java:84) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]
at org.hibernate.validator.engine.ValidatorImpl.validateConstraint(ValidatorImpl.java:452) [hibernate-validator-4.2.0.Final.jar:4.2.0.Final]

After some debugging we detected that the call to 'TypeUtils.isAssignable( validatorType, type )' in 'ConstraintTree.findSuitableValidatorTypes' fails since the available validator types are taken from the Joda library that has been shipped with JBoss instead of the Joda library that is packaged in our ear file.

I guess we are doing something wrong regarding classloading. Can anybody give me a hint?

Answer 1

Have you tried adding a jboss-deployment-structure.xml to your ear file? This way you should be able to exclude the Joda time module:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jboss-deployment-structure>
    <deployment>
        <exclusions>
            <module name="org.joda.time"/>
        </exclusions>
    </deployment>
</jboss-deployment-structure>

See also https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS7/Class+Loading+in+AS7