Question

given the following two Constraints

@NotNull
@Pattern (pattern="foobar")
private String myFooBarMember;

Is there a possibility, if the first one matched (=returned an error) (@NotNull) to not evaluate the second one (@Pattern)? or does JSR303 always evaluate all Constraints? If there is a possibility to not evaluate the second after a first match, please state how this can be done.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Well, I’m not a JSR 303 specialist, but I’ve found the following excerpts from the 1.0 FR:

2.3. Constraint composition

Note:

If a composing constraint fails and if the composed constraint is
marked as @ReportAsSingleViolation, the Bean Validation provider is
free to not process the other composing constraints for this composed
constraint.

and:

3.5. Validation routine

• for all reachable fields, execute all field level validations (including the ones expressed on superclasses) matching the targeted
  group unless the given validation constraint has already been
  processed during this validation routine for a given navigation path
  (see Section 3.5.1) as part of a previous group match.

So from the latter, I’d say that by default all validators will be executed.

From the former, I’d say that this (constraint composition) would be one way to achieve what you want. Although it might (and probably is) dependent on the Bean Validation implementor, so you’d need to read some proprietary docs.