Hi Gavin, Thanks for the info. I was under the belief that the factory method would be called in the invoke application phase... Are you saying that instantiations take place in the render phase instead? I probably need to understand the JSF lifecyle some more and JSF/Seam in general (I'm still a beginner). But I'll definitely look into page actions. The overall goal of this status component was that the retrieveStatus method called a Web service (via JAX-RPC) to retrieve the status of something - whose value (status) could be later retrieved. If there was an error in retrieving the status, the exception would be thrown and I thought it would be caught by (and dealt with) the Seam exception filter. I never thought it would take place in the render phase (but then again, I probably don't understand the lifecycle). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3988605#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...