Once you’ve created your validator and implemented the appropriate pre-validation method(s), the only thing left to do is to register it. You need to register your validator to associate it with the action or attribute it is intended to validate.

When registering a validator for an action, you may make the association using the action name only, or using a combination of action name and object type. In most cases, using just the action name to identify your validator is sufficient and preferred. When registering a validator for an attribute, you make the association using the attribute’s descriptor ID.

Basic Validator Registration

To register your validator (using only the action name for an action), you need to add an entry to *service.properties.xconf like this:

Once propagated to *service.properties, it should produce an entry like this:

Type-Based Validator Registration

If you feel you have a case where it makes sense to register your validator using an action’s object-type in addition to action name, it is very similar to registering a validator using only the action name. The difference lies in the requestor attribute in the properties entry. For validators that do not use an object type, the requestor attribute is set to null. For a validator to be registered using object type, the requestor value will be the fully-qualified class name of the type it is to be registered for.

The class name that is used in the requestor attribute corresponds to a class name from actions.xml.

For example, consider this fragment of an actions.xml file (NOTE: some text eliminated for readability):

In this case, the action we're looking at is called create. Obviously, it's likely that there will be multiple actions defined in the system named create. However, the validation rules for each create action may be different, depending on the type of object being created. Therefore, it might make sense to have separate validators for the create action for, say, a Problem Report and the create action for a Part.

Suppose we have a validator defined called com.ptc.windchill.enterprise.change2.validators.ChangeMgmtCreateWizardsValidator that we want to register for create actions, but only if the action is to create a Problem Report.

We could look at the actions.xml entry above and see that the create action for a Problem Report is actually defined for an objecttype whose name is problemReport and, more importantly, whose class is wt.change2.WTChangeIssue.

By using that class value from actions.xml as the requestor attribute in our properties entry, we can tell the validation service that we only want to register our validator (com.ptc.windchill.enterprise.change2.validators.ChangeMgmtCreateWizardsValidator) for create actions whose object type is wt.change2.WTChangeIssue, like this:

That's really all there is to it. Basically, if you want to register your validator for an action, but only if that action is associated with a certain object type (in actions.xml), you use the class attribute from actions.xml as the requestor attribute in your properties entry.

A few notes:

Verifying Validator Registration

There is a command line report you can run to see which validators are registered for a given action or attribute. If your validator is not appearing in this report, that means it is not registered correctly, and will never get called.

Examples follow:

Finding a single validator (non-type based)

Finding multiple validators (non-type based)

Finding a single validator (type-based)

Finding multiple validators (mix of type-based and non-type based)