Data access from an enterprise entity bean

Container-managed persistence (CMP) developers can use access intent to provide hints on how the application server run time should manage the details of persistence without having to explicitly manage any of the persistence logic from within their application.

However, there are still situations where developers must develop bean-managed persistence (BMP) entity beans. Because the only meaningful difference between BMP and CMP components is who provides the persistence logic, BMP beans should leverage access intent hints just the same as the application server does on behalf of CMP beans. This ability becomes especially important when BMP entities and CMP entities want to share connections. BMP beans configured with the same concurrency as the CMP beans and implemented to the same isolation level mapping as the CMP can share connections.

Developers can apply access intent policies to BMP entity beans as well as to CMP entity beans. It is expected that BMP developers use only those access intent attributes that are important to a particular BMP bean. The access intent service interface is bound into the java:comp namespace for each particular BMP bean. The access intent policy retrieved from the access intent service is current from the time that the ejbLoad process is called until the time that the ejbStore process completes its invocation.