"shane.bryzak(a)jboss.com" wrote : Best practice I'd say is to use an Integer. Hi Shane, thanks for your time. While it obviously is a good idea to switch to Integer where null-references are wanted, the fact that i used an int initially is a good indicator, that null isn´t that useful ;) I do not see, what is wrong with using primitives here. The problem was that the initialization must be done via Seam like this: @In(create=true) @Out(scope = ScopeType.SESSION) private int documentListPageSize; @Factory(value = "documentListPageSize", scope = ScopeType.SESSION) public int createDocumentListPageSize() { return UIListHelper.DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE; } The problem was that create=true was missing on @In. While this works fine now (yep, with *int*s), it looks like doing this programmatically is quite more readable, than the above use of Annotations: private SeamSessionLocal pageSize = new SeamSessionLocal("documentListPageSize", UIListHelper.DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE); where SeamSessionLocal is a wrapper to an Attribute of the SessionContext. Well kind of flavour, i guess. Thanks again Shane. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4025806#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...