[bv-dev] Distinguishing cross-parameter and generic constraints

[Emmanuel Bernard]

I must admit I have not made my mind. The small advantage I find in having two annotations is that it is readable at a glance what the constraint is even just by reading its javadoc (assuming @Documented). In the second approach, you need to explicitly put it in the javadoc or have your users access to the source code and parse the @Constraint

What do others think?

On 15 janv. 2013, at 15:14, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org> wrote:

> 2013/1/15 Emmanuel Bernard <emmanuel at hibernate.org>
>> I can live with that but we must make it crystal clear that in case of
>> ambiguity, we raise an exception. Otherwise, someone changing the method
>> sig might have some nasty surprises.
> 
> And which of the options
> 
>     @CrossParameterConstraint(validatedBy=MyCrossParameterValidator.class)
>     @Constraint(validatedBy=MyGenericValidator.class)
>     public @interface MyConstraint { ... }
> 
> vs.
> 
>     @Constraint(
>         validatedBy=MyGenericValidator.class,
>         crossParameterValidatorType=MyCrossParameterValidator.class
>     )
>     public @interface MyConstraint { ... }
> 
> would you prefer?
> 
> Personally I'd lean towards the latter, since there would be exactly one meta-annotation denoting an annotation as constraint annotation type, with all attributes for the required configuration.
> 
> If following the 2nd approach, we should IMO add a default clause to validatedBy() (set to the empty array), allowing for the convenient definition of cross-parameter only constraints. According to [1] this change would be binary-compatible.
> 
> But this is no strong preference, I could also live with the two separate annotations.
> 
> --Gunnar
> 
> [1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Evolving_Java-based_APIs_2#Evolving_API_interfaces_-_API_methods
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