scope of a controller and a validator

Question

We are developing an application using Spring MVC. There is a page which displays list of user, a check box next to it, and a submit button at the bottom of the page.

A logged in user can select those check boxes and submit, currently a controller checks whether the selected user list is empty or not and acts accordingly. Should we just bring a validator only to do this check ? or else is it fine to do it in the controller itself ? Is there any doc which says what a controller, validator should do and should not do ?

Answer 1

Until Spring 3.0 is released - there is no built-in support for model validation. You'll have to handle validation on your own - like this:

@RequestMapping
public String post(@ModelAttribute MyModel myModel, BindingResult result){
   myValidator.validate(myModel, result);
   if (result.hasErrors()) return "myView";
   ...
}

You can do what you like, it's your code. But by convention, the controller should just be concerned with directing things - validation should really be in a separate validator.