Hibernate validation with custom messages in property file - spring

Question

Hi am using hibernate validator in jersey rest service.
Here how can we pass value to the property file message as follows
empty.check= Please enter {0}
here in {0} i need to pass the value from annotation
#EmptyCheck(message = "{empty.check}") private String userName
here in the {0} i need to pass "user name", similarly i need to reuse message
please help me out to solve this.

Answer 1

You can do this by altering your annotation to provide a field description and then exposing this in the validator.
First, add a description field to your annotation:
#Target({ FIELD, METHOD, PARAMETER, ANNOTATION_TYPE })
#Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
#Constraint(validatedBy = EmptyCheckValidator.class)
#Documented
public #interface EmptyCheck {
String description() default "";
String message() default "{empty.check}";
Class<?>[] groups() default {};
Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default {};
}
Next, change your message so that it uses a named parameter; this is more readable.
empty.check= Please enter ${description}
Since you're using hibernate-validator, you can get the hibernate validator context within your validation class and add a context variable.
public class EmptyCheckValidator
implements ConstraintValidator<EmptyCheck, String> {
String description;
public final void initialize(final EmptyCheck annotation) {
this.description = annotation.description();
}
public final boolean isValid(final String value,
final ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
if(null != value && !value.isEmpty) {
return true;
}
HibernateConstraintValidatorContext ctx =
context.unwrap(HibernateConstraintValidatorContext.class);
ctx.addExpressionVariable("description", this.description);
return false;
}
}
Finally, add the description to the field:
#EmptyCheck(description = "a user name") private String userName
This should produce the following error when userName is null or empty:
Please enter a user name