I have stripes:link tag in a jsp with an event attribute:

<stripes:link href="${actionBean.context.currentStage.stripesForwardAction}"  addSourcePage="true" event="showTab2Link">

This triggers the validation to trigger on nested properties:

    @ValidateNestedProperties({
    @Validate(field="county", required=true, minlength=2, maxlength=2, mask="\\d\\d"),
    @Validate(field="parish", required=true, minlength=3, maxlength=3, mask="\\d\\d\\d"),
    @Validate(field="holding", required=true, minlength=4, maxlength=4, mask="\\d\\d\\d\\d")
}) 

However this would been fine if the actual values it is validation are not present, but they are present within the html and when debugging the bean. Why would the stripes:link trigger this?
If I change it to an stripes:submit then it is fine.

thanks,

Dave