This is misleading, since it suggests that the Resource has children. Once an expand-node icon is clicked, it disappears, since at that point the tree impl tries to load the children and realizes there aren't any. To fix this, we'll need to add a new 'hasChildResources' boolean field to ResourceLineageComposite, that the GUI can check to determine if the Resource has children and render the node correctly. This field could be initialized in ResourceManagerBean.getResourceLineageAndSiblings() by executing the following code for each of the "children": Query childCountQuery; if (authorizationManager.isInventoryManager(user)) { childCountQuery = PersistenceUtility.createCountQuery(entityManager, Resource.QUERY_FIND_CHILDREN_BY_CATEGORY_AND_INVENTORY_STATUS_ADMIN); } else { childCountQuery = PersistenceUtility.createCountQuery(entityManager, Resource.QUERY_FIND_CHILDREN_BY_CATEGORY_AND_INVENTORY_STATUS); childCountQuery.setParameter("subject", user); } childCountQuery.setParameter("parent", resource); childCountQuery.setParameter("category", null); childCountQuery.setParameter("status", InventoryStatus.COMMITTED); long childCount = (Long) childCountQuery.getSingleResult(); composite.setHasChildResources(childCount > 0); However, we'll need to check that this addition doesn't significantly increase the time it takes to load the tree.