Validator and SimpleFormController

[jajckson]

Just want an opinion here.

I have a number of simple validations to perform on some trivial screens.
They only have a few fields that require input validation.

Would there be a downside of implementing the Validator interface within a SimpleFormController Class?
This would eliminate the need for an additional class with only a few lines of code.

So I would have something like

class SomeFormController extends SimpleFormController implements Validator {

public void validate(Object obj, Errors errors) {
// do my form validation
}

}

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Bjorn Johnson]

I guess I would ask what the benefit is of having one less class.

To me the potential issue is that you can't use that Validator elsewhere. Well, you could, I suppose, but you might not think to given it being named SomeFormController. So this could impact scalability and maintainability, but I don't think it wouldn't work.

[jajckson]

I agree that it makes the class less reusable, and I wouldn't try to reuse the entire controller just to do validation.
But the validator is already bound to the form for the controller, so I don't know that there is really much reuse potential anyway.

In addition, you can always override the Validator anyway by injecting a new Validator.

I would define the SomeFormController as the validator in the constructor as so:

public SomeFormController {

setValidator(this);

}

So upon startup, Spring could override this behavior by injecting a different Validator.

The approach does work BTW. I just wanted opinions as to whether or not it is considered good form.

Thanks for the reply!