Joel and Lincoln, thanks for your input.
It's good to know that the problem can be explained because of String's immutability but I agree with Lincoln that this seems like a shortcoming with JSF or Mojarra. I have another case in the same application where I want to modify a list of Long's but I will have to implement the same wrapper logic there as well.
Also, does anyone know where this type of detail would be documented? Could I figure it out by looking at the source code for dataTable?
Thanks again,
-Chris
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