Re: [bv-dev] Should getters be considered methods during validation

Well yes as you can imagine I do think getters should not be considered methods. Let me try and give you my arguments. ## Backward compatibility If we treat getters as regular methods, we would add a new behavior to all existing constrained beans. Things that were constrained at specific lifecycles boundaries would now be constrained every time a getter is called. That would break backward compatibility. Even if a getter was to be constrained on call - you would probably want to constrain on the setter - it's quite unlikely that existing attribute style constraints would be the same as the method ones. They would likely use different groups. ## 80% - 20% rule It seems to be that amongst the getXxx() methods, there is a whole lot more getters than action methods. That's why making getXxx() act as attributes does fly for me. ## Interception technology Someone could mitigate the backward compatibility issue by arguing that CDI beans are not that often hosting getters. I am not sure that is true but even if it was, this eclipses more thorough interception technologies like AspectJ which could intercept all getter calls even possibly from the JPA or other bean data providers. ## But But I do like the simplicity of the rule claiming that all methods are constrained regardless of their similarity to the Bean specification. I do not currently thing that this argument alone outweighs the other problems. Regardless, there are situations where action methods look like getters. ### Forcing a getter to behave as a regular method To solve this use case, we can introduce a `@ValidateOnCall` annotation that should be placed on the getter method. ### Should we leave this undefined in the spec? A "solution" could be to leave this undefined in the specification and let providers provide the right mechanisms. I don't think this would be the right approach. This is an important enough use case for us to cover it I think. Additional means of adjusting the behavior can be left to providers. What do you think? Emmanuel On Sat 2012-11-03 16:36, Gunnar Morling wrote: