I have a form in a xhtml page that displays parent and child data.  A publication type (book, e.g.) has multiple requests. Simple. My backing bean loads the request and I can see in the debugger that the publication type is there.  In the page, I have a selectOneMenu that is bound (value) to

#{libRequest.publicationType}

and its select items is bound to a

List<SelectItem> pubTypes

.  When I load an existing record, if it has a pubType selected, it is correctly displayed as such.

I copied this pattern for another type of association. Item source type (vendor, e.g.) has many requests.  Again, I bound the selectOneMenu to the

#{libRequest.sourceType}

and the select items to the backing bean

List<ItemSourceType>

The types show up in the list correctly, but the type specified in the request (which I can see clearly is there in debugger) is not selected.

I cannot figure out why the binding is working for one but not the other.

Ideas?