The first issue I suspect is a class loading problem - you probably have multiple (stale) copies of the selectitems.jar floating around. SelectItemsConverter is IIRC in selectitems.jar not in selectitems-ui.jar for precisely this reason - so you can extend it in a backing bean. N.B. if you register the converter in faces-config.xml you can just package it in the war and then both selectitems jars can go in WEB-INF/lib http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/index.html Step 4 of http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-jsf3/#N102AC View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4001081#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...