 <p>Spring 3 introduced the Converter SPI which makes this quite easy. Have a look at 6.5 in the <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/validation.html#beans-beans-conversion" rel="nofollow">documentation</a> </p> <p>Taking source from the docs and putting in your country, you would do something like </p> <pre><code>package my.converter; final class StringToCountry implements Converter&lt;String, Country&gt; { public Country convert(String source) { return // whatever you do to get a country from your string } } </code></pre> <p>Then in the xml config you would configure the converter</p> <pre><code>&lt;bean id="conversionService" class="org.springframework.context.support.ConversionServiceFactoryBean"&gt; &lt;property name="converters"&gt; &lt;list&gt; &lt;bean class="my.converter.StringToCountry"/&gt; &lt;/list&gt; &lt;/property&gt; &lt;/bean&gt; </code></pre> <p>As GriffeyDog pointed out, you may want to put the country id in for the select path so you can get the Country by ID or something instead of whatever is returned by toString() of your Country object.</p>