Welcome to the JavaRanch Maurits!
Unfortunately, you gave me a little
too much detail. The only way I can tell you with total assurance is to kill a tree (print it out) and cross-check the details. However, based on experience with similar questions, I can make some observations that may help.
First of all, however, a backing bean is NOT a controller except in very limited ways. It's primarily a Model in the MVC paradigm. To be more precise, it's the Display Model, as opposed to say, a Domain Model, or Business Model. Meaning that its primary purposed is to support the MVC portion of the app. JSF's controllers are mostly in the JSF tags and the JSF
servlet.
However, that's just being picky about terminology because I've been seeing people get in trouble for failing to make the distinction.
My suspicion is that you're expecting an immediate response when you change the menu selection. That's not how it normally works.
JSF is based on HTML and HTML doesn't work that way either. HTML only updates the server when a Submit is done for the form. Changing a selection won't cause a Submit.
To force a Submit when changing a SELECT control (SelectOneMenu), you'd need some JavaScript. To be precise, you'd need something like an AJAX request. Core JSF doesn't do AJAX. For that, you either need to write your own JavaScript or to use one of the extension tagsets that support AJAX, such as RichFaces or IceFaces. In RichFaces, you can define an ActionListener that fires off under AJAX control when a selection is changed, and uses the "reRender" RichFaces attribute to update only the affected part of the view. In your case, that would be the Notes area, if I read your question correctly.
