Configure JSR-303 hibernate validator with different mappings

Question

I'm looking into using JSR-303 with hibernate validator. We would like to be able to have different validations per each customer or have a base set of constraints and allow them to be overridden.

I'm not sure what's the best way to do this.

Using annotations for constraints is not suitable since they're essentially hard-coded in the models. I know I can use XML to externalize the validations (creating META-INF/validation.xml which specifies constraint-mapping files). But I'm not really sure how to easily make this configurable for multiple customers.

I suppose I would like to be able to set a simple property so that when we deploy it uses a completely different set of constraint-mapping files.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could create a ValidatorFactory per customer which you configure with customer-specific constraint mapping XML files like this:

ValidatorFactory validatorFactory = Validation
    .byDefaultProvider()
    .configure()
    .addMapping(...) //input stream with an XML constraint mapping
    .addMapping(...) //another input stream with an XML constraint mapping
    .buildValidatorFactory();

When you're working with Hibernate Validator, you could also use the API for programmatic constraint declaration to create individually configured validator factories.