The people on this forum really are very friendly and extremely helpful. It just needs a reciprocal amount of effort - which starting a Wiki page would be a good example of. Maybe start with something like "Understanding Seam DataModels" and use this thread as a basis? Regarding your question though; From the manual: anonymous wrote : 27.10.1. Annotations for use with dataTable | | @DataModel | Outjects a property of type List, Map, Set or Object[] as a JSF DataModel into the scope of the owning component (or the EVENT scope if the owning component is STATELESS). In your Bean you declare your DataModel as @DataModel | private List<Thing> things; This outjects a DataModel context variable called 'things' into the same scope (eg. Event, Session) as your Bean. But in your datatable you refer to <h:dataTable value="#{accountService.things}" var="thing"> which is just a list and not a DataModel. Try changing it to <h:dataTable value="#{things}" var="thing"> Hope this helps. Cheers, Damian. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4112505#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...