Question

I tried implementing validation for my web application like described in section 5.7.4.3 of the Spring 3.0 documentation:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
    <property name="webBindingInitializer">
        <bean class="org.springframework.web.bind.support.ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer">
            <property name="validator">
                <bean class="org.springframework.validation.beanvalidation.LocalValidatorFactoryBean" />
            </property>
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

I’ve added hibernate-validator as a dependency and everything looks OK, but starting my web app results in the following error:

org.springframework.beans.NotWritablePropertyException:
Invalid property 'validator' of bean class
[org.springframework.web.bind.support.ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer]:
Bean property 'validator' is not writable or has an invalid setter method.
Does the parameter type of the setter match the return type of the getter?

When looking at the API it’s pretty obvious that something’s wrong. LocalValidatorFactoryBean implements javax.validation.Validator while ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer.setValidator() expects a org.springframework.validation.Validator.

Any solution for this?

EDIT

About LocalValidatorFactoryBean:

This is the central class for javax.validation (JSR-303) setup in a Spring application context: It bootstraps a javax.validation.ValidationFactory and exposes it through the Spring Validator interface as well as through the JSR-303 Validator interface and the ValidatorFactory interface itself.

Like Alex Marshall stated below this is not the case. LocalValidatorFactoryBean only implements javax.validation.Validator.

LocalValidatorFactoryBean does extend SpringValidatorAdapter though, which implements org.springframework.validation.Validator.

Answer 1

Here’s a workaround for this issue:

Using the validator bean configuration from my question above you have to add the following code in each controller using validation.

@Autowired
private javax.validation.Validator validator;

@InitBinder
protected void initBinder(WebDataBinder binder) {
    binder.setValidator((org.springframework.validation.Validator) this.validator);
}

It’s dirty, but it works because LocalValidatorFactoryBean extends SpringValidatorAdapter and this implements org.springframework.validation.Validator.