Forgot to mention it's better not to mess your rule definition with things like persistence code or rendering code. It's better to do session.setGlobal("cheeseList", cheeseList); , let your rule engine use or modify the cheeseList. The modification is automatically visible to the conversation bean which passed this cheeseList to your rule session. The conversation bean should be the central controller/coordinator for all kinds of "engines" (stuff like jsf can be viewed as rendering engine, stuff like hibernate/JPA persisting engine, jBPM process engine, Drools rule engine....)and let your "engines" to manipulate the state space of your entity's. That said, inside each kind of "engines", it's best to see only entities around and a handle to the central controller, but not any dependencies to any other kind of "engine". Ideally, the conversation bean should not manipulate the state space of any entity, but just pass entities around (read only!) to different engines. But this is not practical for applications that are not complex enough. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4065885#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...