Manually call Spring Annotation Validation

I’m doing a lot of our validation with Hibernate and Spring Annotations like so:

public class Account {
    @NotEmpty(groups = {Step1.class, Step2.class})
    private String name;

    @NotNull(groups = {Step2.class})
    private Long accountNumber;

    public interface Step1{}
    public interface Step2{}
}

And then in the controller it’s called in the arguments:

public String saveAccount(@ModelAttribute @Validated({Account.Step1.class}) Account account, BindingResult result) {
   //some more code and stuff here
   return "";
}

But I would like to decide the group used based on some logic in the controller method. Is there a way to call validation manually? Something like result = account.validate(Account.Step1.class)?

I am aware of creating your own Validator class, but that’s something I want to avoid, I would prefer to just use the annotations on the class variables themselves.

Answer

Spring provides LocalValidatorFactoryBean, which implements the Spring SmartValidator interface as well as the Java Bean Validation Validator interface.

// org.springframework.validation.SmartValidator - implemented by LocalValidatorFactoryBean
@Autowired
SmartValidator validator;

public String saveAccount(@ModelAttribute Account account, BindingResult result) {
    // ... custom logic
    validator.validate(account, result, Account.Step1.class);
    if (result.hasErrors()) {
        // ... on binding or validation errors
    } else {
        // ... on no errors
    }
    return "";
}