As I suspected ;) There is AFAIK no way around the problem. As you say, what needs to happen is that you need to be able to ask EL to give you the final expression for expression, but there is no functionality in EL for this. I know Jacob is aware of this problem and I think he is working on a new version of EL so hopefully that will fix this. The only way I know to get around this is to extend model validator and make it take a string that references the bean.property to validate against. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4003806#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...