Dropdown and lifecycle

Question

I've been testing a very simple page with a dropdown list which is bounded to an ArrayList, a button to display "hello" and an outputtext where the "hello" string will be displayed. The dropdown selectitems value is bounded to the arraylist. The arraylist is populated in the constructor of the page bean. There are no errors, everything runs smoothly. The dropdown list box is populated. However, my button that will just display a hello world on a outputtext control is never reached. I 've used the LifeCycleStudy (http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/reference/sampleapps/2004q2/lifecycleStudy.zip) sample application to see if the event handler for the button is reached.. unfortunately it is not. why is it so? if removed the last three lines of the code below(listJournals.add...) it will work just fine... Where should i place the initialization of the dropdown?
by the way, this is are the code added at the LifeCycleStudy in page1's constructor to populate the arraylist.
listJournals = new ArrayList();
listJournals.add(new SelectItem(new Integer(1),"TEST 1"));
listJournals.add(new SelectItem(new Integer(2),"TEST 2"));
listJournals.add(new SelectItem(new Integer(3),"TEST 3"));
thanks!

Answer 1

By the way....these are the events that are missing when i added the dropdown list... this proves that the button1_action eventhandler is never called...
(from the server.log)
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside beforeUpdateModelValues HELLOWORLD|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside beforePhase|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside afterUpdateModelValues HELLOWORLD|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside afterPhase HELLOWORLD|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside beforeInvokeApplication HELLOWORLD|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside beforePhase|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside button1_action, posting back to Page1 HELLOWORLD|#]
|WebModule[lifecyclestudy]Page1.java - inside afterInvokeApplication HELLOWORLD|#]
it's really weird... if i removed the codes that will add SelectItem in the list the event handler will be called... :(