In the interest of answering my own question, it turns out it the backing bean wasn't being updated because another h:selectOneMenu wasn't validating correctly. I was using a Map to populate the select menu and it was erroring out with a strange value not valid error, which meant it skipped the update model phase. I changed my f:selectItems to use a SelectItem[] and the problem went away. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4050291#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...