You can override the Validators component to add your own createValidator() strategy. But I don't think that's really what you are after. If you think about what I posted, the problem is not in creating a class validator or having Hibernate call it. Hibernate does exactly that by default in JBoss. Add a validator to your entity and it WILL get called. The problem is in having the validation exception handled gracefully. Without the code I showed above, persist just throws a validation exception and there isn't a whole lot of you can do about it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3996950#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...