While reviewing the work done so far on the Shale Validator integration in preparation for the changes described in SHALE-340, I ran into an issue that is noted in the comments on SHALE-36 but needs to be explicitly decided. If you have explicitly defined a converter (or JSF can do it for you implicitly because the value is bound to a bean property with a known type), then the "value" that is passed in to the validate() method will already have been converted. This will lead to problems when calling methods like GenericValidator.isInt() for an argument being validated as an integer, which assumes the incoming value is a String.
What I propose is that the validate() methods in shale-validator should ignore the "value" parameter to the validate() method. Instead, they should cast the UIComponent to an EditableValueHolder, and then call getSubmittedValue() on that to get the value to be validated. This seems much more in line with the assumptions Commons Validator makes (it is validating strings). The potential cost of this is that the format validation done here is basically wasted if a converter has already been applied, but it allows the validation logic to not worry about this kind of thing. Thoughts? Craig
