Disabling @Valid Annotation in a Spring Integration Test

Today I was writing some Spring integration tests to validate some new endpoints had a Filter applied correctly, but I was fighting with the endpoint methods requiring the request to be valid.

This was because the request body was annotated with @Valid (but is true for other JSR380 annotations) which Spring Boot then adds validation for - Validation in Spring Boot on Baeldung has some good information about it.

I didn't really want each request I was sending to require full validation, as the requests required a lot of setup, and that wasn't really what I was trying to test at this point.

Thanks to my colleague James, I now have a way around that!

Spring Boot 2.x.x uses a LocalValidatorFactoryBean to orchestrate the validation of these, which means if you provide the following MockBean, you can remove its validation:

@MockBean private LocalValidatorFactoryBean validator;

Leaving it without any test setup will disable any validation that may be performed for @Valid annotations as there is no implementation behind it to perform validation. But if you want to do anything extra, you can set it up as needed.