MethodArgumentNotValidException from spring-web requires spring-context to compile

[Andrius-B]

Affects: org.springframework:spring-web:5.3.23

Trying to update from 5.2 to 5.3.23 lead us to an interesting issue, where a usage of MethodArgumentNotValidException would not compile. A minimal reproduction would be a gradle project as follows: excerpt from build.gradle:

dependencies {
    implementation 'org.springframework:spring-web:5.3.23'
}

A java class:

import org.springframework.web.bind.MethodArgumentNotValidException;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String [] args) {
        throw new MethodArgumentNotValidException(null, null);
    }
}

This fails to compile with following error:

error: cannot access BindException
        throw new MethodArgumentNotValidException(null, null);
        ^
  class file for org.springframework.validation.BindException not found

This is because MethodArgumentNotValidException (from spring-web) extends org.springframework.validation.BindException (from spring-context), but the pom.xml that gradle sees does not specify this compile time dependency: https://search.maven.org/artifact/org.springframework/spring-web/5.3.23/jar Only spring-beans and spring-core are specified as compile time dependencies (thus classes from these are present.)

This change of MethodArgumentNotValidException extending BindException was discussed in issues #23107 #26219 I think the correct behaviour here would be to mark spring-context as a compile time dependency for spring-web as that would play along with various build systems better.