Spring-Boot How to properly inject javax.validation.Validator

Question

I've got a problem injecting the Validator into the spring application bean when attempting to validate a model using JSR-303 (hibernate-validator)

My main configuration class is:

@EnableAutoConfiguration
@EnableWebMvc // <---
@EnableJpaRepositories("com.example")
@EntityScan("com.example")
public class MainConfiguration {

According to the javadocs:

/**
 * Provide a custom {@link Validator} instead of the one created by default.
 * The default implementation, assuming JSR-303 is on the classpath, is:
 * {@link org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean}.
 * Leave the return value as {@code null} to keep the default.
 */
Validator getValidator();

Hibernate-validator is on the classpath. I'm trying to inject it into the Repository:

@Repository
public class UserRepositoryImpl implements UserRepositoryCustom    {

    @Autowired
    private Validator validator;

Exception being thrown:

 No qualifying bean of type [javax.validation.Validator] found for dependency:

UPDATE:

The partial work-around for this is to define this in the main configuration class:

  @Bean
    public Validator validator() {

        return new org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean();
    }

But integration tests (the ones which require org.springframework.test.context.web.WebAppConfiguration; annotation and use validation logic) fail.

Solution

You need to declare a bean of type LocalValidatorFactoryBean like this:

<bean id="validator"
    class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean"/>

in XML or

@Bean
public javax.validation.Validator localValidatorFactoryBean() {
   return new LocalValidatorFactoryBean();
}

in Java Config.

Edit:

It is important to understand that if JPA is being used and is backed by Hibernate, then Hibernate will try to automatically validate your Beans as well as the Spring Framework. This can lead to the problem of javax.validation.ValidationException: HV000064: Unable to instantiate ConstraintValidator because Hibernate doesn't know about the Spring Context and as far as I can tell there is no way to tell it, not even with the LocalValidatorFactoryBean. This causes the Validator's to run twice. One correctly, and once that fails.

In order to disable the default Hibernate ORM validation, the following property for Spring needs to be set:

spring.jpa.properties.javax.persistence.validation.mode=none

I updated this example, because it was the one I kept finding over and over again about the Validator's not being injected, and it turns out this was the problem I faced.

This part of the Spring documentation has all the details

Comments

[WeMakeSoftware]

One note conserning the JavaConfig. The return value of the method should be javax.validation.Validator . I'll edit your answer

[geoand]

@SteveGreen Glad the answer helped you!

[Lucas]

This does not seem to work or has changed when using Spring Boot. It expects a org.springframework.validation.Validator not a javax Validator.

[Amrut]

shouldn't it just work without all of this, when you use @SpringBootApplication on the main application class. This should automatically included component scan & annotation-driven config for your app, which will configure correct validator.

[geoand]

@Amrut I agree. Check out this discussion