Well have you simply tried to add a single h:messages tag to your page? Let's see if you get any messages. For example when you use hibernate validation annotations on your entity beans, then seam will add matching jsf validators by itself. The behaviour you describe is consistent with that: The string object is converted, but validation fails, so it is never transfered to the model. I am no expert in JSF internals eithers. I am just working my way through "Core Java Server Faces, 2nd edition" and I can really recommend it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4083478#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...