JSF / EL occasional failure to resolve action method - jsf

Question

Environment:
JSF 2.1.11
el-api 2.2
Eclipse Kepler
Tomcat 7
Chrome
IE-11
I have a working xhtml and bean which contains several action methods and work fine.
I added another commandButton:
<h:commandButton id="idBtnSave" value="Save"
action="#{imageMetadataEditProvider.saveLabelWithBox}"></h:commandButton>
...and the action method:
public void saveLabelWithBox() {
saveBoundingBox();
saveImage();
}
... then for some inexplicable reason, EL cannot find method saveLabelWithBox on the bean.
I did several rounds of renaming the method, rebuilding, undeploying and cleaning the Tomcat environment, redeploy. That almost always failed.
HOWEVER, What seemed to work was simply to move the saveLabelWithBox(){} block to elsewhere in the bean. Suddenly, it worked again, so I gullibly renamed the method to something more meaningful, then it failed again... EL could not find the method. So I again renamed it and moved it, rebuilt, redeployed, now it works again.
I'm curious whether others have had such quirky behavior and what you think might cause this, beyond the typical suspects of corrupt Eclipse workspace, or being on a microwave beam path.

Answer 1

I finally resolved this quirky problem which seemed related to corruption in the environment. The cure seemed to be to create a new bean with a different name and import all the methods from the formerly unreliable bean. I also did the usual Eclipse -clean startup, although that seemed to have no effect. I also removed the Eclipse .metadata and restarted, although that also seemed to have no effect.
Oddly, after building a new replacement bean, it would not load via annotations:
#ManagedBean
#ViewScoped
...so I was obliged to define the replacement bean in faces-config, and then it would load at page request time. I think there is still something screwed up in the environment. But all the methods are now being resolved and it's been working OK for a couple of days.
Your mileage may vary.