Eclipse EMF Validation Framework
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EMF Validation Framework Developer Guide > Programmer's Guide

Validation Listeners and Problem Reporting

One kind of validation client is the one that performs validation operations via the ModelValidationService API. Another kind of client is the one that responds to validation operations by reporting problems to the user or by taking some other appropriate action. These are the validation listeners.

Validation Listeners

The same ModelValidationService that provides the invocation of validation operations also provides a listener API for clients to learn about validation that has occurred and the results generated. Listeners may be registered at run-time using the addValidationListener(IValidationListener) method. More commonly, however, they are registered statically on the org.eclipse.emf.validation.validationListeners extension point.

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A listener is registered on the extension point with an association to zero or more client contexts. This serves to filter out events for validation operations that are not of interest to the particular client application, that did not occur in its context.

   <extension point="org.eclipse.emf.validation.validationListeners">
       <listener class="org.eclipse.example.validation.ProblemsReporter">
           <clientContext id="com.example.MyClientContext"/>
       </listener>
   </extension>

The ValidationEvent provides a good deal of information about the validation operation, including:

the evaluation mode, indicating whether the operation was a batch or a live validation
the target elements that were validated (the root selections in the case of batch validation or the notifications that were validated in the case of live validation)
the validation results, as a list of IConstraintStatuses
the client context IDs matching the elements that were validated
a mapping of data, under string keys, provided by the client that performed validation for the purpose of communicating it to listeners. This information is supplied via the IValidator.putClientData() API
the overall severity of the validation problems

Reporting Validation Problems

One of the validation listeners provided by the EMF Validation Framework, itself, is the internal LiveValidationListener class, which shows results from live validation operations in a dialog or a console (subject to the user's settings in the Model Validation preference page).

An application that wishes to have its live validation results shown in this dialog may simply register its Client context on the org.eclipse.emf.validation.ui.UIRegisteredClientContext extension point.

   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.emf.validation.ui.UIRegisteredClientContext">
      <clientContext id="org.eclipse.example.libraryContext"/>
   </extension>

For a listener that wishes to report batch validation problems to the problems view, the framework provides a convenient utility class MarkerUtil that creates problem markers from the IStatus results of validation:

public class ProblemsReporter implements IValidationListener {
    public void validationOccurred(ValidationEvent event) {
        if (event.matches(IStatus.WARNING | IStatus.ERROR)) {
            // fabricate a multi-status for the MarkerUtil to consume
            List results = event.getValidationResults(); 
            IConstraintStatus multi = new MultiStatus(
                  "org.eclipse.example.MyPlugin", 1,
                  (IStatus[]) results.toArray(new IStatus[results.size()]),
                  "Problems were found by validation", null);

            try {
                // create problem markers on the appropriate resources
                MarkerUtil.createMarkers(multi);
            } catch (CoreException e) {
                // creation of problem markers failed for some reason
                MyPlugin.getLog().log(e.getStatus());
            }
        }
    }    
}

By default, the markers are created using the org.eclipse.emf.validation.problem marker type that extends EMF core's org.eclipse.emf.ecore.diagnostic marker type. Clients can specify their own marker type, if they wish.