Random Thoughts

In my previous blog post I talked about validating Spring Web applications using JSR 303 annotations. In that post, we used the out of the box JSR 303 constraints such as @NotEmpty and @Size. These out of the box constraints should be sufficient for most cases. However, there will be situations where you want to develop custom constraints. In this post, we will look at creating a custom constraint
that validates the ISBN number of a book in our Online Bookstore Admin application.

Each JSR 303 validation constraint consists of two parts. The first part is the constraint annotation itself.

package com.inflinx.blog.bookstore.constraint;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

import javax.validation.Constraint;
import javax.validation.Payload;

@Target({ElementType.FIELD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Documented
@Constraint(validatedBy=IsbnValidator.class)
public @interface Isbn 
{
	String message() default "{Isbn.message}";

	Class[] groups() default {};

	Class[] payload() default {};
}

The JSR 303 specification requires each constraint annotation to define the following three attributes:

• message – The error message that gets returned upon validation failure. Here we have defined the default value Isbn.message that acts as a resource bundle key. It is possible to just hard code a message by simply omitting the braces.
• groups – This defines the constraint groups that this annotation needs to be associated with. Here we will use the default group.
• Payload – This holds the additional metadata information that can be supplied by validation clients. Here we are using the default empty array.

The @Target, @Retention and @Documented annotations are needed for the annotation declaration. The @Constraint annotation declares the validator that we will be using to validate elements annotated with @Isbn constraint.

The next step in creating the custom constraint is defining the validator.

package com.inflinx.blog.bookstore.constraint;

import javax.validation.ConstraintValidator;
import javax.validation.ConstraintValidatorContext;

import org.apache.commons.validator.routines.ISBNValidator;

public class IsbnValidator implements ConstraintValidator
{
	@Override
	public void initialize(Isbn isbn) { }

	@Override
	public boolean isValid(String value, ConstraintValidatorContext validatorContext) 
	{
		if(value == null || "".equals(value))
		{
			return true;
		}
		else
		{
			return ISBNValidator.getInstance().isValid(value);
		}
	}

}

Every constraint validator needs to implement the ConstraintValidator interface. The actual implementation of the IsbnValidator is straightforward. According to the specification, if the annotated element’s value is null or empty the validation should succeed. If you don’t want a null value, the element should be annotated with @NotNull annotation. The actual validation of the ISBN value is delegated to the Apache Validation API.

Now that we have the constraint defined, the next step is to use it in our Book Store application. To do that, we start out by creating a new property in the Book domain class and annotated it with @Isbn annotation. Here is the modified book class:

package com.inflinx.blog.bookstore.domain;

import javax.validation.constraints.Size;

import org.hibernate.validator.constraints.NotEmpty;

import com.inflinx.blog.bookstore.constraint.Isbn;

public class Book
{
	@NotEmpty
	private String name;
	
	@Size(min=1, max=50)
	private String description;
	
	@NotEmpty
	@Isbn
	private String isbn;
	
	public String getIsbn() {
		return isbn;
	}
	public void setIsbn(String isbn) {
		this.isbn = isbn;
	}
	public String getName()
	{
		return name;
	}
	public void setName(String name)
	{
		this.name = name;
	}
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
	public void setDescription(String description)
	{
		this.description = description;
	}
	
	@Override
	public String toString()
	{
		return "Name: " + name + ", Description: " + description + ", ISBN: " + isbn;
	}
}

Then we need to modify the form.jsp file to add the ISBN form field.

 		<form:form method="post" action="book.html" commandName="book">
					<table>
						<tr>
							<td>Name:</td> <td><form:input path="name" /></td> <td><form:errors path="name" /></td>
						</tr>
						<tr>
							<td>Description:</td> <td><form:textarea path="description"/></td> <td><form:errors path="description" /></td>
						</tr>
						<tr>
							<td>ISBN:</td> <td><form:input path="isbn" /></td> <td><form:errors path="isbn" /></td>
						</tr>
						</table>
					<input type="submit" value="Create" />
		</form:form>

The final step in this process is to add a new validation key/value to the messages.properties file. Here is the new messages.properties file:

NotEmpty.book.name=Name is a required field
Size.book.description=Description must be between 1 and 50 characters
Isbn.book.isbn=Please enter a valid ISBN

Now, when you submit the form with an invalid ISBN value, you will see a validation error.

It is not uncommon for enterprises to store their employee information in LDAP. Now this poses an interesting challenge for building ORM applications that need access to employee information. For example, consider writing an application that tracks the projects an employee is currently working on. Such an application would have the following simple domain model:

An ORM mapping tool such as Hibernate can easily map this domain model to a database backend. However, since the employee data comes from LDAP, hibernate out of box cannot create the mapping between Project and Employee domain objects. One way to solve this problem would be to implement a custom EntityPersister. In this post I will show a simple hack for achieving this using JPA EntityListeners.

First let us create Java objects and relationships between them. Here is some minimal code:

public class Employee implements Serializable
{
  private Long id;
  private String firstName;
  private String lastName;
  
  // Other fields, getters, setters and other logic
}

public class Project implements Serializable
{
  private Long Id;
  private String name;
  private String description;
  
  private Employee employee;
  
  // Getters, setters and other logic  
}

The next step is to define tables in the database. Here is the table structure:

PROJECT
———–
PROJECT_ID | NAME | DESCRIPTION | EMPLOYEE_ID |

EMPLOYEE
—————-
EMPLOYEE_ID |
Since all the employee information (including EMPLOYEE_ID) is available in LDAP, this table simply holds the unique id of an employee.

Then, create mappings for the domain objects using JPA. The mapping for Application is straightforward:

@Entity
@Table(name="PROJECT")
public class Project implements Serializable 
{
  @Id
  @Column(name="PROJECT_ID")
  // Sequence generator declarations
  private Long Id;
  
  @Column(name="NAME")
  private String name;
  
  @Column(name="DESCRIPTION")
  private String description;
  
  @ManyToOne(cascade= {CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.MERGE, CascadeType.REFRESH})
  @JoinColumn(name="EMPLOYEE_ID")
  private Employee employee;

@Entity
@Table(name="EMPLOYEE")
public class Employee implements Serializable
{
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(generator="assigned")
  @GenericGenerator(name="assigned", strategy="assigned")
  @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID")
  private Long id;
  
  @Transient
  private String firstName;
  
  @Transient
  private String lastName;
  
  // Getters, setters and other logic
}

With these mappings in place, hibernate can easily load the Project
object and the corresponding Employee object. To populate the
transient fields in the Employee object, an EntityListener needs to be
created. Here is a simple implementation for the entity listener:

public class EmployeeEntityListener
{
  @PostLoad
  public void loadEmployee(Employee employee)
  {
    Map<String, String> employeeData = // Read the employee data from LDAP using the employee Id as the key
    employee.setFirstName(employeeData.get("FIRST_NAME"));
    employee.setLastName(employeeData.get("LAST_NAME"));
  }
}

Finally register this entitylistener:

@Entity
@Table(name="EMPLOYEE")
@EntityListeners(EmployeeEntityListener.class)
public class Employee implements Serializable
{
  ——-