Sometimes you only have a list or array of objects you'd like to bind to a ListSelect or a Table and forget about the fancy Container features like lazy loading or automatic updates. Creating a Container from a list or array of beans, string, integers is easy. And you can configure the CollectionContainer to have different type of ids. CollectionContainer is a read-only Container implementation suitable best for small amounts of data, backed simply by a collection storage. Here are some samples: Use the object itself as id (like in the stock BeanItemContainer): select.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromBeans(myBeans)); select.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromPrimitives(new String[]{"One","Two","Three"})); Index based id that allows duplicate objects: select.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromBeans(myBeans,true)); select.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromPrimitives(new String[]{"One","Two","Three","One"},true)); A two dimensional array to a table using: String[][] array = new String[][] { new String[]{"One","Two"}, new String[] {"Three","Four"}}; table.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromPrimitives(array)); And you can even use a bean property as the item id: select.setContainerDataSource(CollectionContainer.fromBeans(myBeans,"idField")); This is an experimental component, but it has been successfully utilized in many projects already. It only supports reading, not writing or adding items to container.