Question

When using annotation based validation for a form bean, what is the best practice for unit-testing those beans in order to ensure that correct validations annotations are specified for each field?

For example, if you have:

public class MyForm {
    @NotNull
    private String name;
}

What is the best way to verify that @NotNull is applied to it?

One obvious way is to create a validator, throw a null at it and expect it to fail. But in my view this is not the best way as you’ll be testing the behaviour and implementation of @NotNull using that rather than trusting the framework.

Ideally I would want to use reflection or a utility that gives me the possibility of just asserting that an @NotNull (and any other) validation is applied to a given field, rather than having to send various combination of values that fail validation.

Is there an elegant way of doing this, or am I on the right track in general?

Answer 1

You can also write unit tests for your Beans which are annotated usin JSR303 using validator factory.
See example:
http://musingsofaprogrammingaddict.blogspot.com/2009/02/using-bean-validation-with-spring.html