Good point, and that was the missing link that explains it to me. On the other hand, at the EL level shouldn't the non-existence of a referenced context variable typically indicate an error condition? I know it's not all that uncommon to be rather sloppy with the contexts, but aren't these vars essentially globals? (Even taking into account "scope", which obviously is not the same narrow as lexical scope in the context of source-level code blocks.) Apologies in advance for my denseness if I'm just missing more obvious explanations =) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3972765#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...