With two months since the last release and more than 38 (non trivial) issues behind us, we felt that it was a good time to release a new version. We are less than 20 days from the proposed final draft so feedback time and polishing are going into overdrive.
Expect a reference implementation and a much improved TCK aligned with this version in the next few days.
What's new
There are too many improvements so let's pick three.
Enable / disable method validation
We worked a lot on method validation and in particular how you can control
whether or not a method or constructor is being validated. You can use
@ValidateExecutable and the XML validated-executables element in
validation.xml to do that.
Message interpolation with UEL
We have also greatly enhanced message interpolation. You can now use the unified expression language inside your messages. This elegantly solves a lot of feature requests we had in this area like:
- the ability to put the validated value in the message
- the ability to format numbers, dates etc according to the locale
Here is an example from @DecimalMin. It uses the min boundary value, the
inclusive parameter in an EL and use a formaatter to display the erroneous
value:
${formatter.format("%1$2f", validatedValue} is incorrect ; must be greater than ${inclusive == true ? 'or equal to ' : ''}{value}
Which will be interpolated into
324.32 is incorrect ; must be greater than or equal to 500
Generic and cross-parameter constraints
Finally we have introduce the ability to make constraints both generic and
cross-parameter aware. This is useful for constraints like @ScriptAssert that
are very flexible.
Review
Please, please, please go and review the specification and tell us if something needs to be fixed.
You can access the specification here. All changes are marked with a different color. Green for additions, yellow for changes and struck through red for removals . This will help you see what has changed precisely.
Please send us your remarks and comments:
- on our mailing list
- in our issue tracker
- or on the Bean Validation forum
If you want to go to the next step and contribute, send us an email to the mailing list and read how to contribute.