spring boot / jpa /maven / eclipse : metamodel classes not generating in project

Question

I've been going thru a lot of docs and posts here and other places and have not found a solution to my problem.

When I build my spring boot / jpa / hibernate / maven project, the metamodel classes are generated in the target/generated-sources folder, but as per the jboss docs, when I set my java compiler -> annotation processing to generate metamodel classes in target/metamodel, no classes are generated, therefor my controller class is not able to access any of the Widget_ fields.

the relevant pom info is here:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-jpamodelgen</artifactId>
    <version>5.3.10.Final</version><!--$NO-MVN-MAN-VER$-->
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

<build>
    <finalName>SpringBootWebAppTest</finalName>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>

        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration>
                    <source>10</source>
                    <target>10</target>
                <compilerArguments>
                    <processor>org.hibernate.jpamodelgen.JPAMetaModelEntityProcessor</processor>
                </compilerArguments>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>


    </plugins>
</build>

I have organized my classes along the lines of this stackoverflow q

@Entity
@Table(name = "widget")
@EntityListeners(AuditingEntityListener.class)
@JsonIgnoreProperties(value = {"created", "lastEdited"}, allowGetters = true)
public class Widget {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue (strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private Long id;

    @NotNull(message = "name is required")
    private String name;

    @NotNull(message = "sku is required")
    private long sku;

with a repository:

@Repository
public interface WidgetRepository extends JpaRepository<Widget, Long>   {

}

a custom repository

public interface CustomWidgetRepository {

    public List<Widget> getWidgetsMatchingName(String searchText);

}

and an impl:

@Service
public class CustomWidgetRepositoryImpl implements     CustomWidgetRepository {

    @PersistenceContext
    EntityManager entityManager;

    @Override
    public List<Widget> getWidgetsMatchingName(String searchText) {
        CriteriaBuilder criteriaBuilder = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
        CriteriaQuery<Widget> query =     criteriaBuilder.createQuery(Widget.class);
        Root<Widget> widgetRoot = query.from(Widget.class);

        // this doesn't compile, as metamodel classes are not created where they can be accessed
        // query.where(criteriaBuilder.like(widgetRoot.get(Widget_.), "%" + searchText + "%"));
        query.select(widgetRoot);
        return entityManager.createQuery(query).getResultList();
    }

}

according to this q (scroll down to march 2018 answer), just setting the compilier->annotation settings in eclipse should be enough. I came across a couple of resources, such as this one that describes how to add the target/generated-sources/annotations to the classpath, but not sure how old that post is, and wondering if it conflicts with the first link that says just to update the compiler->annotation settings.

I asked a related question with regards to metamodel classes, but that project did not use spring boot, and this current project is just a super simple test project to get spring boot jpa stuff running so I can migrate my main project over.

thanks for any help.

Update

It was this maven plugin that adds to target/generated-sources/annotations as a src folder that did the trick.