java - Manually call Spring Annotation Validation

Question

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 1

Going a step further than Jaiwo99 in his answer:

// 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 "";
}

And the mandatory link to SmartValidator JavaDoc if you are interested.