Validating Field Lengths Automatically

Is there a convenient way to automatically validate maximum field lengths based on the length of a field in an underlying DB. (e.g. VARCHAR(25)). I'm using Hibernate so it's not clear to me how I would get at the DB metadata from the Spring web layer, specifically the validator.

Just a suggestion, but if you define lengths in your hibernate template you could use XSL to transform it to JSP (or part of one) with maxlength attributes on your fields.