Figuring this out cost me around three days, because I trusted the ModelValidator to work. I can see the problem and how this is hard to fix, but there should be a way to point people into the right direction in the exception message. We started suspecting hibernate after debugging step by step and checking the getters explicitly before validating an object.

For now, we worked around it by setting the annotations on the getters, but if you guys can think of some way to point a user who is convinced that his object should validate into the right direction.