Validation in Spring MVC

Question

how to get the request object in the validator class, as i need to validate the contents ie the parameters present in the request object.

Answer 1

You have two choices:

• JSR 303 (Bean Validation) Validators
• Spring Validators

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For JSR 303 you need Spring 3.0 and must annotate your Model class with JSR 303 Annotations, and write an @Valid in front of you parameter in the Web Controller Handler Method. (like Willie Wheeler show in his answer). Additionaly you must enable this functionality in the configuration:

<!-- JSR-303 support will be detected on classpath and enabled automatically -->
<mvc:annotation-driven/>

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For Spring Validators, you need to write your Validator (see Jigar Joshi's answer) that implements the org.springframework.validation.Validator Interface. The you must register your Validator in the Controller. In Spring 3.0 you can do this in a @InitBinder annotated Method, by using WebDataBinder.setValidator (setValidator it is a method of the super class DataBinder)

Example (from the spring docu)
@Controller
public class MyController {

    @InitBinder
    protected void initBinder(WebDataBinder binder) {
        binder.setValidator(new FooValidator());
    }

    @RequestMapping("/foo", method=RequestMethod.POST)
    public void processFoo(@Valid Foo foo) { ... }
}

For more details, have a look at the Spring reference, Chapter 5.7.4 Spring MVC 3 Validation.

BTW: in Spring 2 there was someting like a setValidator property in the SimpleFormController.