[FIXED] Difference between @Valid and @Validated in Spring

Issue

Spring supports two different validation methods: Spring validation and JSR-303 bean validation. Both can be used by defining a Spring validator that delegates to other delegators including the bean validator. So far so good.

But when annotating methods to actually request validation, it's another story. I can annotate like this

@RequestMapping(value = "/object", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public @ResponseBody TestObject create(@Valid @RequestBody TestObject obj, BindingResult result) {

or like this

@RequestMapping(value = "/object", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public @ResponseBody TestObject create(@Validated @RequestBody TestObject obj, BindingResult result) {

Here, @Valid is javax.validation.Valid, and @Validated is org.springframework.validation.annotation.Validated. The docs for the latter say

Variant of JSR-303's Valid, supporting the specification of validation groups. Designed for convenient use with Spring's JSR-303 support but not JSR-303 specific.

which doesn't help much because it doesn't tell exactly how it's different. If at all. Both seem to be working pretty fine for me.

Solution

As you quoted from the documentation, @Validated was added to support "validation groups", i.e. group of fields in the validated bean. This can be used in multi step forms where you may validate name, email, etc.. in first step and then other fields in following step(s).

The reason why this wasn't added into @Valid annotation is because that it is standardized using the java community process (JSR-303), which takes time and Spring developers wanted to allow people to use this functionality sooner.

Go to this jira ticket to see how the annotation came into existence.

Answered By - František Hartman
Answer Checked By - David Marino (JavaFixing Volunteer)