Can anyone explain this behavior and tell me how to fix it?

Question

Using NetBeans 6.5 on Windows, Glassfish v2.1
I have a JSF application with a page that has a tab set.
On one of the tabs I have a panel with company information.
One of the components on the page is an InputText field with the value bound to a session bean variable.
The tab also has an Add button.
Here is what the JSP looks like for the input text and button components
   <h:inputText binding="#{MainPage.companyNameTF}" id="companyNameTF" readonly="#{SessionBean1.readOnlyFlag}"
   <h:commandButton action="#{MainPage.mainAddBtn_action}" disabled="#{SessionBean1.disableEdit}" id="mainAddBtn"
        style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; left: 425px; top: 380px; position: absolute; width: 75px" value="Add"/>
     This is all plain vanilla stuff and I would expect that when the Add button is pushed, the session bean property would be filled with
the value entered in the input text field.
In the java code for the page, I have a method to process the Add button push.
Originally, it just called a method in the session bean to check that a value was entered in the input text field by checking the bound
session bean property.
For some reason, that was not getting filled and I was getting either a null or empty string rather than the value in the text field.
I added some checking in the method that processes the Add button push so I could check the values in the debugger.
Here is a sample of that code:
    public String mainAddBtn_action() {
        String s = sb1.getCompanyName();
        s = (String)this.companyNameTF.getValue();
        s = (String)this.companyNameTF.getSubmittedValue();I check this in the debugger and NONE of the variants that I have listed have the value that was entered into the text field.
The submittedValue is null and the others are empty strings (that is what they were initalized to).
This is all pertty straight forward stuff and I am at a loss to explain what is happening.
Can anyone expain this behavior, and, most important, how can I force the values to be present when the Add button is pushed.
I have never experienced this problem before, and have no clue what is causing it.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Basically, the component bindings are just being used in plain vanilla get/set modes.
I set them to "" when I do a clear for the fields and they are set to a value via the text field.
No other action other than to read the values via get to insert them into the database.
And, I always use the get/set methods rather than just setting the value directly.
This is what is so strange about this behavior - I have created dozens of database add/update/delete pages using this same model and have not had a problem with them - even in a tab context.
Not a clue why this one is different.
I did notice that I had an error on the page (in IE7, you get a small triangle warning sign when something is not right).
I figured that might be the problem - maybe buggering up the rendering process.
I tracked that down and do not get that anymore (it had to do with the PDF display I was trying to get working a while back), but that did not resolve the problem.
I don't think there are any tab conflicts - none of the components are shared between tabs, but I will see what happens when I move a couple of the components out of the tab context.
I noticed that it seems to skip a cycle. Here is what I can do.
1) Fill in text fields and add a record - works fine the first time.
2) Clear the text fields
3) Enter new data in the text fields and push Add
4) I get an error saying fields are blank from my data check process.
5) Enter new data and push Add - the record is added with the new data.
My work around is to not enter data in step 3 and just accept the error message in step 4, then go ahead and enter the real data in step 5.
Very ugly, but it works every time.