Grails 2.x + Webflow + Services defined in domain classes = Fail

Environment:

• Grails 2.5.4
• Webflow plugin 2.1.0

I know it's been documented that you can define services inside domain classes for a Grails project. And for the most part this works, until you want to use them in a webflow.

We started noticing some very strange behaviour where the domain classes stored in flow scope started missing property values. For some apparent reason, as the user progresses through the webflow, the properties of these domain classes would reset to null!!

The fix was to remove any service class definitions inside domain classes.