Marking a field as mandatory in the request body for a specific request - spring

Question

I intend to use the same bean as request body for creating/updating/deleting profile (depending on request methods). There are two scenarios for an update. First is updating profile where any parameter like firstName, lastName etc. can be updated except the emailAddress and the second is updating only the emailAddress. For the first case newEmailAddress is optional but for the second case, newEmailAddress field is mandatory.
Below is a sample bean:
class ProfileModel {
#NotEmpty
#Email
private String emailAddress;
#Size(max=30)
private String firstName;
#Email
private String newEmailAddress;
.
.
.
}
I created different API endpoints for updating profile and updating the email address. I tried to find a way to make newEmailAddress field as optional for the first request and required for the second request but couldn't find anything but to manually check in the controller method for the second request and throw Exception.
Is there any other way through which this can be achieved?

Answer 1

The validation groups should solve your problem. See the examples either on beanvalidation.org or at hibernate-validator documentation page.
Basically you will need to add a group attribute value to your annotation constraints. Something like:
class ProfileModel {
#NotEmpty
#Email
private String emailAddress;
#Size(max=30)
private String firstName;
#Email(groups= UpdateEmail.class)
private String newEmailAddress;
and then on your controllers make use of Springs #Validated annotation which allows you to pass a group for which you want to validate.
One endpoint could use then this UpdateEmail group and the other the Default one.

Answer 2

This can be achieved using validation groups. That needs an identifier class or interface.
So you can do something like this:
=> Define a validation group identifier. It can be a class or interface.
public interface MyValidationGroup{}
=> Specify the validation group on request body.
class ProfileModel {
#NotEmpty
#Email
private String emailAddress;
#Size(max=30)
private String firstName;
#Email
#NotBlank(groups={MyValidationGroup.class})
private String newEmailAddress;
.
.
.
}
=> Specify validation group on controller method.
public ProfileModel add(#Validated({MyValidationGroup.class})
#RequestBody ProfileModel profile){
...
}