How to disable Hibernate validation in a Spring Boot project

Question

I have a spring boot project that has a CrudRepository, an Entity and a Controller. I am basically trying to persist an entity based on the data passed to the Controller.

To do this, I am using spring-boot-starter-jpa. My Entity is annotated with JSR-303 annotations, which are checked in the controller before the data gets passed to the CrudRepository for persistence.

Controller method:

@RequestMapping(value = "users", method = { RequestMethod.POST })
public SuccessfulResponse<User> addUser(@Valid @RequestBody User user, BindingResult validation) {
    if (validation.hasErrors()) {
        throw new ValidationException(validation);
    }
    User saved = this.users.save(user);
    return new SuccessfulResponse<User>(saved);
}

Entity:

@Entity /* JPA */
public class User {

   @Id /* JPA */
   @Column(name="email_address", nullable=false, length=255) /* JPA */
   @UserUnique
   private String emailAddress;

}

The cause of my issues is the UserUnique annotation. Its validator looks like this:

public class UserUniqueValidator implements ConstraintValidator<UserUnique, String> {

   private UserRepository users;

   @Autowired
   public UserUniqueValidator(UserRepository users) {
       this.users = users;
   }

   @Override
   public void initialize(UserUnique annotation) {}

   @Override
   public boolean isValid(String value, ConstraintValidatorContext context) {
       return users.findOne(value) == null;
   }
}

What seems to be happening is, the validation is getting run twice. Once in the controller via the @Valid annotation, and once when Hibernate tries to persist the object. However, when Hibernate tries to persist the object, it throws:

javax.validation.ValidationException: HV000064: Unable to instantiate ConstraintValidator: class test.UserUniqueValidator`

This seems to be because its not spring-aware and cant inject the dependency into the constructor. So, what I want to do is disable Hibernate validation completely (as its redundant and already happening in the controller).

There seems to be a property called javax.persistence.validation.mode which you can set to none. However, I cant for the life of me figure out where to set it in a code-based configuration.

I realise there are questions like JSR-303 dependency injection and Hibernate but these are all using xml config and manually configuring parts of the persistence layer.

What I want to do is "post-configure" the required parts of the persistence layer that Spring Boot creates for me because if I define my own then I am no longer leveraging Spring Boot's auto configuration. Can anyone help me determine if 1) this is possible and 2) which parts do I need to configure and how?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As [M. Deinum] mentioned in a comment on my original post, the solution is to set:

spring.jpa.properties.javax.persistence.validation.mode=none

In the application.properties file.

Additionally, this behaviour is described here (its easy to miss because no example is provided).