Why a converter? I simply think its a 'neater' approach - it makes the JSF cleaner (no logic about how the id's of your entities) AND you get an object back in your backing bean not a String so again, it makes the business logic cleaner (no presentation logic) BUT they are more effort to write. You can take a look at the example - this uses an alternative converter in the backing bean. Alternatively you can do it the-jsf-way, and register a converter in faces-config and reference that. The 'Getting Started' section of the docs say to put both in jars in WEB-INF/lib but the 'Reference Guide'/'Jars' discusses putting the selectitems.jar in the ear - I've updated the text to make it a bit clearer. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4000828#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...