[bv-dev] On the support for Optional (was Re: Support for constraints on container values (e.g. Collection<@Email String>))

On 7 Nov 2016, at 23:42, Hendrik Ebbers <hendrik.ebbers(a)me.com&gt; wrote: I don’t think that support for Optional is that important since having a field of type Optional looks like an anti-pattern to me. Normally Optional should be used as a method return type and not as a type for a field. Supporting it in the bean validation might end in strange model classes. Example: The following model looks good to me: public class Model { @NotNull private String name; public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public Optional<String> name() { return Optional.ofNullable(name);} } On the other hand this looks like an anti-pattern to me: public class Model { @NotNull private Optional<String> name; public Optional<String> getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = Optional.ofNullable(name); } }