JSF and Bean Validation group integration

[nickarls]

Say I have an entity with a @NotNull String name.

I have an inputText value pointing at it and a list of entities to choose from with a commandLink. Since I want the changes to be stashed away in the model when I switch entities, I have immediate=false on the commandLinks.

Now comes the case where I have created a new entity and then choose to navigate away to another entity. When I click the link, of course validation is trigged and failure is ensured.

Are there any good patterns for this? I could of course have different validation groups for the states "new" and "edit". I don't want to write custom constraints for every case just to check the internal state (null @ID = new) etc. But how can I choose which validation group to go by while still maintaining integration with the JSF layer? I could of course bypass the view layer validation altogether and validate manually with different groups in different backing bean actions but binding the messages back to the correct inputText seems a bit cumbersome.

One would think that this kind of scenario would be quite common? Does anyone have any good patterns for this?

Thanks in advance,

   Nik

[nickarls]

Any theories?

[hmvictor]

Hi.

The tag f:validateBean has an attribute to specify the validation groups (a list of the classes of the groups). You can set it to a value expression so you can have a group when in "edit" mode" and another group when in "new" mode.

Example:

<h:inputText value="#{bean.name}">

  <f:validateBean validationGroups="#{bean.validationGroups}"/>

</h:inputText>