Restlet 1.2 M1 is your answer! It incorporates enhancements to the base XmlRepresentation class which now has a “validating” boolean property to configure XSD/DTD validation.

Let me know if it works better for you! The best is to continue this discussion in our mailing list at:
http://www.restlet.org/community/lists

Cheers,
Jerome

I am working for Overstock on restful web services recently.

We ran into a problem with the JAXB validation.
The web service can pass an invalid object with missing attributes, the restlet framework does not seem to capture it.

We do pass an implemented “ValidationEventHandler” object (with basic logging messages) to the JaxbRepresentation constructor, but the callbacks are never hit.

I was wondering if you have any insights to the following questions:

1. Is JAXB supposed to do the validation?

2. If the “ValidationEventHandler” callbacks are not hit, does
it mean it is a restlet bug, or there is something we need to
do to turn on the JAXB validation within restlet?

When and how do the callbacks from restlet get called?

3. I believe JAXB validation can be done on either marshalling
on client side, or unmashalling on server side, what might
be the potential performance cost if we are able to turn
on the validation somehow?

4. What is preferred, client side or server side validation?
I believe server side validation should be turned on anyway,
validation is always crucial to ensure the integrity of the
incoming data.

Look forward to your reply.

Thanks,

Xiaodong