Spring custom validations

While building applications and services it is very important that we maintain data integrity especially if they are data centric. It is crucial to have control over the data that the application interacts with to ensure it behaves as expected. This can be done using validations.

Many times the data received may get corrupted before reaching the application or the user may provide wrong inputs. This will not create a problem if validations are applied as the application can return invalid requests and may ask the user to provide correct fields, but in absence of validations it is surely to cause problems at some instance, as it may process incorrect data and disrupt the flow. 

Spring makes our lives easier by providing us with some build-in validations like 

• @NotNull
• @NotBlank
• @Size
• @Min

But sometimes these are not enough. For eg when we need to validate a field which should only expect a 10 digit phone number. In cases like these we need to build our own custom validations.

In this blog we will have a look at how we can add custom validations with the help of an example.

Prerequisites

• Setup a spring boot Java 8 project using spring Initializr.

The pom should look like this:

	<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-validation</artifactId>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
			<scope>test</scope>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
			<artifactId>hibernate-validator</artifactId>
			<version>6.0.10.Final</version>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>

	<build>
		<plugins>
			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
				<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			</plugin>
		</plugins>
	</build>

Use case

For this example we will build a simple application which will provide us with an endpoint to POST data.

The Request body POJO looks like this. Here we have defined 3 fields which are name, customerId and phoneNumber. We will validate customerId and phoneNumber by making our own custom validations.

Defining Annotations

The first step is to define our Annotation with @interface.

@Constraint: This is the annotation where we provide the class which will validate our field.

@Retention: It defines at what point the annotation should be discarded. We will provide RetentionPolicy as RUNTIME so that it will be available to JVM during runtime.

@Target: As the name suggests here we define where this annotation can be used.

@Documented: It ensures that classes using this annotation show this in their generated JavaDoc. Removing it won’t affect our code but it is a best practice to use it.

There are 3 attributes inside our annotation which are message(), groups() and payload(). Out of these we only need to know about message() for now which is the default message that will be given in case the validation fails.

Validation Class

This is the class where we will define the validation logic and provided in @Constraints.

The first step is to implement the ConstraintValidator<>

Interface which provides us with two methods to @Override that are initialize and isValid.

Here we do not need to initialize any value for our validation hence we will not implement the initialize().

public class CustomerIdValidator implements ConstraintValidator<CustomerId, String> {

    private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(CustomerIdValidator.class);

    @Override
    public boolean isValid(String customerId, ConstraintValidatorContext constraintValidatorContext) {
        if(!customerId.isEmpty() && customerId.matches(Constants.CUSTOMER_ID_REGEX)) {
            log.info("Received valid customerId of type 'UUID'");
            return true;
        } else {
            log.error("Received invalid customerId");
            return false;
        }
    }
}

Implementing the Validation annotation

As we have already seen in our POJO above we have applied @CustomerId
On our customerId field hence applying the validation.

Now that we have defined the constraints we will now define our controller which will accept Person as body simply log the fields for this example.

Note: @Valid is very important here as it triggers the validation on the request.

@RestController
@RequestMapping("person")
public class ValidationController {

    private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ValidationController.class);

    @PostMapping
    public Person create(@Valid @RequestBody Person person) {
        logger.info("Received valid customerId {} and phone number {} ", person.getCustomerId(), person.getPhoneNumber());
        return person;
    }
}

Checkout our other blogs on java and java on Knoldus blogs.