Question

I’m wondering if it’s possible to bypass bean validators for certain actions in JSF2.

I’ve generated entities from my DB schema using NetBeans 7, which include validation attributes.

In my JSF application I have a search screen who’s backing bean uses an instance of an entity to hold the user’s query parameters. I then use reflection on the entity instance to generate a dynamic query to perform the user’s search. Once the user performs the search they can select an item and go off to an edit page where I’d like the validation enforced.

My problem is that on the search screen, bean validation on my entity is enforced. So if my entity has 3 required fields, and the user searches on only 1 of the 3, I get two “field is required” error messages.

I know I could get around this by creating a new class for my search backing bean that doesn’t have validation annotations on it, but that doesn’t seem like an ideal solution to me: I’d end up with two essentially identical classes, just with different annotations.

Answer 1

You could add f:validateBean with disabled=”true” to your first form where you don’t want them validated and then not include it on the view where you do:

<h:inputText value="#{entity.property}">
   <f:validateBean disabled="#{true}"/>
</h:inputText>