Thank you Peter, I seem to be getting to the problem now. I have a few Lists in my entity, and it seems the problem lies within comparing them. When having a this.somelist.equals(o.somelist) in my equals, wherever the lists are equivalent or not, the result is always false, therefore generating a jsf validation error (value is not valid) during the rendering of the page after the submit when jsf compares the selected item with all items in the dropdown list. During runtime, somelist is of the type org.hibernate.collection.PersistentBag. This class does not implement the equals from the List interface, but the equals from Object. I have removed the comparison of lists in my equals, and it now works fine. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3989668#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...