Use custom validation messages in Hibernate + Spring

Question

I tried the steps from the answer here: Hibernate Validator, custom ResourceBundleLocator and Spring

But still just getting {location.title.notEmpty} as output instead of the message.

dispatcher-servlet.xml

<bean name="validator"
    class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean">
    <property name="validationMessageSource">
        <ref bean="resourceBundleLocator"/>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean name="resourceBundleLocator" class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
    <property name="basenames">
        <list>
            <value>/WEB-INF/validationMessages</value>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

/WEB-INF/validationMessages.properties:

location.title.notEmpty=My custom message

Form (Class Location)

@NotEmpty( message = "{location.title.notEmpty}" )
private String title;

What's going wrong here?

Solution

Got it! :-)

I added the following bean instead the above mentioned two into my dispatcher-servlet.xml:

  <bean id="messageSource" class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
    <property name="basename" value="/WEB-INF/validationMessages" />
  </bean>

Then, in my validationMessages.properties I used the following syntax:

NotEmpty.location.title=My custom Message

I guess this is the reason: I used the Hibernate validation annotations (not the javax ones)

And for general the syntax of the messages file should look like

[ConstraintName].[ClassName].[FieldName]=[Message]

Hope this helps some other people out there ;-)

And to access the message from a spring controller just add @Autowired private MessageSource messageSource; as a class field and use the messageSource.getMessage methods. Because I'm just using one locale I used messageSource.getMessage( "NotEmpty.location.title", null, null )

Comments

[darek]

Nice, but it works also for Hibernate validation annotations :)

[dtrunk]

Yes, my first thought was it works only for hibernate validation annotations but it works for both - hibernate and javax.

[anre]

It's not necessary to adjust the syntax when specifying the validator in <mvc:annotation-driven validator="validator" />, see stackoverflow.com/a/21508937/1672678 and stackoverflow.com/a/22655303/1672678.

[Admin]

If you are using Spring Boot, you can take advantage of autoconfiguration by adding the following key to application.properties: spring.messages.basename=your/basename/messages