Hello all,
I have an entity bean, let's say Account with the following interface:
public interface Account extends javax.ejb.EJBObject {
public void setName(String name);
public void setAccountNumber(String acctNum);
}
and in the deployment descriptor of the AccountBean these
methods have the transaction attribute of Required. My client
is a servlet that reads account name and number from the
HTTP request, finds and/or creates an Account and calls
the above setXXX methods. The requirement is that both
calls be part of the same transaction but the only way
to achieve that in this scenario is either 1) Use bean-managed
transactions (not recommended) or 2) Wrap the calls with a
stateless session bean whose method accepts parameters for all setXXX
methods or 3) Provide a bulk accessor/mutator method.
Method (2) works for scenarios when the number of parameters
that have to be passed to various setXXX methods is small but what
if the above Account interface had many methods all of which had to be
invoked in this transaction:
public interface Account extends javax.ejb.EJBObject {
public void setName(String name);
public void setAccountNumber(String acctNum);
public void setOwner(String owner);
public void setBalance(BigDecimal balance);
public void setCreationDate(Date crDate);
public void setExpirationDate(Date exDate);
// ... and so on
}
The stateless session bean's interface would have to be extended
to include the entire set of parameters passed to Account's
setXXX methods:
public interface BankAssociate extends javax.ejb.EJBObject {
public void setupAccount(String name, String acctNum, ... );
}
It seems that the only viable alternative is a bulk accessor/mutator
method (3) with value objects:
public class AccountValue implements ValueObject {
public String name;
public String acctNum;
}
public interface Account extends javax.ejb.EJBObject {
public void setName(String name);
public void setAccountNumber(String acctNum);
public void setAccountValue(AccountValue acct);
public AccountValue getAccountValue();
}
This works as intended but begs the question: what are
setXXX methods doing in the Account interface if they cannot *really* be
part of the same container-managed transaction if invoked separately from a
non-transactional client?!
Furthermore consider a scenario where the bulk accessor/mutator methods are
added to the interface to solve the problem outlined above but (supposedly)
only once: when the account is being set up (all properties are required).
The day after the account has been created, the account owner wishes to
modify his name and extend the expiration date. This translates to two
setXXX method calls...but they cannot be part of the same transaction unless
routed through the bulk mutator method.
Is this a shortcoming of the specification or am I missing something here?
Thanks,
Alex Smith
INSight LLC
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