Hibernate Validator Exceptions

I'm using Hibernate Validator in an application with EJB and Spring MVC. I'm using JBoss 5, Hibernate 3 and Spring MVC version 3.

I'd like to try and catch validation exceptions at Spring Exception Resolver level and generate an error message based on the InvalidStateException message. I don't want to put exception handling logic in the data access layer; I want this to be driven by annotations and just handle the validation errors in one centralized place.

The domain model is being correctly开发者_如何学JAVA verified and an exception of type InvalidStateException is thrown as expected when I try to create an invalid entity (e.g. violate a length constraint on a field). At the point of trying to catch the exception in my instance of a Spring Exception resolver, I find my original exception has disappeared and a javax.ejb.EJBTransactionRolledbackException has taken its place. The original exception is not in the caused by list.

My first guess was that org.hibernate.validator.InvalidStateException wasn't annotated with ApplicationException, so I installed a Hibernate event listener, caught the original exception and rethrew it as a new exception annotated with ApplicationException. This has no effect.

One further complexity is that the web tier is calling EJBs via a Remote interface. I annotated my exception class with WebFault, but to no avail.

What should I do to ensure the exception bubbles all the way up?

Try this?

protected InvalidStateException extractValidationException(Throwable ex) {
        Throwable e = ex;
        while (e != null) {
            if (e instanceof InvalidStateException) {
                return (ValidationException) e;
            } else if (e instanceof EJBException) {
                e = ((EJBException) e).getCausedByException();
            } else {
                e = e.getCause();
            }
        }
        return null;
    }