Hi @gsmet,

I'm a colleague of @alanbos and have to agree with his view, your suggestion will cause a lot of pain to initially implement in our product and also for ongoing work. The ability to specify constraints directly onto sub-classes was a very useful feature, and it seemed to be a feature you could only achieve through an XML mapping configuration.

I hope you can reconsider your view that it was a misfeature and should be treated as an exception during the bootstrap of the validator configuration.

I have this morning raised this PR https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-validator/pull/958 which fixes this issue if you were to accept it as a first class feature of the XML mapping configuration.

Kind regards,
Rob