I see. The reason I made them public is that many of them already were... I think there was about four instances of this method that were not public; one of which was on the base class. All the rest were already public. Should I make *all* of the getObject methods be protected? I had some problem with getValue/setValue in the past, though to be honest I don't remember what it was. I just had this on my todo list to clean up, one way or another. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4022525#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...