My understanding is this: Seam calls the methods in your session beans when it encounters the action="#{name.action}" declarations, where name is the name of the Seam managed component, and action is the name of the method in the managed component. However, before the method actually gets called, the Seam interceptor gets invoked, which populates all the @In and @DataModelSelection annotated fields. After the method invocation, control is passed back to the Seam interceptor and it updates the contexts with the @Out and @DataModel annotated fields. Hope this helps... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3981585#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...