Is the Select component's VALUE_CHANGED event out of the scope of user sessions ?

I'm using v5.4-beta-17 and I'm facing an issue.

I have an object persisted using the @Persistent annotation.

And then I have a Select component on the page. While handling the Select
component's VALUE_CHANGED event method, it seems I can't access the
persisted object, its always null although I've initialized it in the
Form's PREPARE event (This event is fired whenever the form containing the
Select component is preparing for rendering\submission)

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*Muhammad Gelbana*
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mgelbana