Design Type Question

[Gregg Bolinger]

This isn't about MyFaces specifically so I apologize but this list is the best JSF resource I know of. ;)

I have a page that contains a list of Articles.  There are also filter criteria to filter the list of Articles.  The article list is a dataTable who's value is a method in the backing bean that returns a list of articles.  Simple enough.  So when the page first loads, I get all the articles.

The problem I am facing is part of the filter is 3 levels of categories.  Category, Sub Category, and a Sub Sub Category.  Each of these is a selectOneMenu and the child catagories depends on the parent category.  So I have valueChangeListeners registered so that when one drop down changes, the child dropdown gets new values.

The problem with this is that when this happens, my method to get the list of articles is called.  But I don't want this to happen until I click the Search button.  So I am just looking for solutions to solve this.

Thanks.