Hibernate/JPA/Seam - Validate an Entity Programmatically?

I have an entity in my JBoss Seam-based project that makes use of Hibernate Validator annotations through开发者_JAVA百科out. Although I've got directives in my JSF pages to require elements, etc. I'd like to be able to do one last failsafe validation before calling entityManager.persist() and ending up with a validation exception.

Is there any way to validate the entity programmatically? I've never worked that deeply with Hibernate/JPA, so I'd love to hear any recommendations for getting this working. Thanks!

---

Bean Validation API supports programmatic usage, see, for example, Hibernate Validator Reference.

---

If you are using JSF, you can have the validation to occur before your business method is called. If you are not seeing this, I would review the setup, as it should happen automatically and you wouldn't need to manually perform the validation. But you can do that, as you can see in axtavt's answer.