What is the proper way to validate requests with Resteasy?

Question

I use Resteasy in combination with Google Guice using Resteasy-Guice. I have been looking for ways to validate my request bodies. I want to do for example:

public static class MyPojo {

   @NotEmpty private String contents;

}

And then use in my resource

@POST
@ValidateRequest
public void doPost(@Valid MyPojo myPojo) {
   // use myPojo only if valid
}

I have been working with the resteasy-hibernate-validator-provider. But since I switched to newer versions, this introduced the (unwanted?) dependency to EJB. See also: RESTEASY-1056. In the comments is stated that you should switch to the newer validator-11 instead:

Switch to resteasy-validator-provider-11, which implements the newer Bean Validation 1.1 specification.

The docs say:

Validation is turned on by default (assuming resteasy-validator-provider-11-.jar is available), though parameter and return value validation can be turned off or modified in the validation.xml configuration file. See the Hibernate Validator documentation for the details.

I however do not manage to get this working to my configuration, because I find myself including dependencies like hibernate-validator, javax.el-api, javax.el and hibernate-validator-cdi and annotations like ValidateOnExecution. I however do not find any of this being instantiated or invalid requests being rejected.

What is the preferred, lightweight, and working way to do validation with Resteasy?

Answer 1

• I accidentally had a transitive dependency to the hibernate-validator-provider which caused previous tries to fail. Ensure that you do not have a transitive dependency to the hibernate-validator-provider. For me this caused the following exception: issues.jboss.org/browse/RESTEASY-826 .
• Based on Thomas answer I added dependencies to javax.validation, resteasy-validator-provider-11, hibernate-validator.
• Then I still received exceptions (java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/el/PropertyNotFoundException). Based on this answer I added javax.el-api and el-impl as dependencies. I think this is because I use an embedded servlet container.
• I had to remove the @ValidateOnRequest annotation on the resources, they are not necessary anymore

Final working configuration:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.validation</groupId>
        <artifactId>validation-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.0.Final</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.jboss.resteasy</groupId>
        <artifactId>resteasy-validator-provider-11</artifactId>
        <version>3.0.11.Final</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
        <artifactId>hibernate-validator</artifactId>
        <version>5.0.1.Final</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.el</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.el-api</artifactId>
        <version>3.0.0</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.glassfish.web</groupId>
        <artifactId>el-impl</artifactId>
        <version>2.2</version>
    </dependency>