Spring Boot 3.4.6 validation not triggering for @Email and @NonNull on MongoDB @Document entity

I'm building a Spring Boot 3.4.6 application using MongoDB and encountering an issue where @NonNull and @Email annotations are not triggering validation errors/exceptions even though I am using @Valid @RequestBody in the Controller. The only validation that is working is @Indexed (unique = true)

(Yess, @NonNull and @Email are 2 completely different annotations...)

I have tried:

• Rebuilding my entire project (mvn clean build)
• Checking for the required dependencies
• Confirmed all annotations are from jakarta.validation.*, not javax.validation.* (for @Email annotation)
• Sending clear invalid inputs using Postman

Yet, no validation error is triggered, and the user still gets created.

Here’s my setup:

User.java Entity Class

package com.sathwikhbhat.journalApp.entity;

import jakarta.validation.constraints.Email;
import lombok.AllArgsConstructor;
import lombok.Data;
import lombok.NoArgsConstructor;
import lombok.NonNull;
import org.bson.types.ObjectId;
import org.springframework.data.annotation.Id;
import org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.index.Indexed;
import org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.mapping.DBRef;
import org.springframework.data.mongodb.core.mapping.Document;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

@Data
@NoArgsConstructor
@AllArgsConstructor
@Document(collection = "users")
public class User {
    @Id
    private ObjectId id;
    @Indexed(unique = true)
    @NonNull
    private String userName;
    @NonNull
    @Indexed(unique = true)
    @Email
    private String email;
    private boolean sentimentAnalysis;
    @NonNull
    private String password;
    @DBRef
    private List<JournalEntry> journalEntries = new ArrayList<>();
    private List<String> roles;
}

PublicController.java Controller Class

package com.sathwikhbhat.journalApp.controller;

import com.sathwikhbhat.journalApp.entity.User;
import com.sathwikhbhat.journalApp.service.UserService;
import jakarta.validation.Valid;
import lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.dao.DuplicateKeyException;
import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.PostMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestBody;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@Slf4j
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/public")
public class PublicController {

    @Autowired
    private UserService userService;

    @PostMapping("createUser")
    public ResponseEntity<?> createUser(@Valid @RequestBody User user) {
        try {
            userService.saveNewUser(user);
            log.info("User created successfully: {}", user.getUserName());
            return new ResponseEntity<>(HttpStatus.CREATED);
        } catch (DuplicateKeyException e) {
            log.error(e.getMessage());
            return new ResponseEntity<>("Username already exists: ", HttpStatus.CONFLICT);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            log.error(e.getMessage());
            return new ResponseEntity<>("Internal server error: " + e.getMessage(), HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
        }
    }
}

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

You mentioned that annotations NonNull and Email do not work.

• NonNull - Is not a a validation annotation. The annotation you are looking for is NotNull (from jakarta.validation.constraints)

• Email - Is very permissive and email which you consider invalid may be considered valid by the annotation (see javax.validation.constraints.Email matching invalid email address for details). You can add regex parameter to indicate what pattern you want to use to validate emails

Also, note that as indicated by @M. Deinum in comments, if you imported only validation-api in your project you have access to the annotations but there may not be a validator implementation used to validate them. Check if you have a dependency used to validate the annotations, such as spring-boot-starter-validation