@Decebal: Thank you. I realized the problem lies somewhere around the model..
Changes in the sort order do get saved to the underlying .xml-file, but those changes won't get rendered by just doing an AJAX update. When I press F5 to make a browser refresh, the page gets rendered properly. The model is a LoadableDetachableModel. http://pastebin.com/5ReSqdJf - line 52: save changes to .xml - line 55: update ListView (parent of it) via AJAX - line 62: initialize ListView & Model I double-checked I really update a parent container, and as far as I understand the LoadableDetachableModel, it loads its ressources everytime it is used. So when I re-render the component via AJAX, it should pull the current values from the .xml. But that does not happen, somehow.. And that the AJAX update actually DOES work, when I move an item from one to another list, confuses me even more.