JPA and DAO pattern

[Krzysztof Koziol]

Hi All,

I'm going to use JPA and DAO pattern in my design. As we know persistence context (EntityManager) could be injected in the Session Bean since it's managed by app server but could not be injected in DAO itself. The question is how could we access entity manager in the DAO classes? It could be passed as an argument in the method call but I'm looking for more elegant way to do this. Any ideas?

Regards,
Krzysztof Koziol

[Will Myers]

can't you just use the @Resource annotation and have the container inject it? or do a JNDI lookup?

[Krzysztof Koziol]

will myers wrote:can't you just use the @Resource annotation and have the container inject it?

I dont't think so. DAO is just a POJO without any specific annotation or declaration in an application descriptor therefore is not managed by the container like Session Beans, Managed Beans, Servlets etc.

[Rishi Shehrawat]

You could model DAO as stateless bean. Then you could inject the entity manger. There has been discussion on pro/cons in this thread.

DAO as session beans

You could just lookup the entity manger in your DAO. In case you are calling all DAO's from session beans the container will manage the lifecycle of entity manager.

[Krzysztof Koziol]

Right, lookup could be an option.

[Kumar Amit]

Rishi Shehrawat wrote:You could model DAO as stateless bean. Then you could inject the entity manger. There has been discussion on pro/cons in this thread.

DAO as session beans

You could just lookup the entity manger in your DAO. In case you are calling all DAO's from session beans the container will manage the lifecycle of entity manager.

I reckon using another stateless session bean for just having a DAO pattern is an overkill. But again its my personal opinion. I would implement the CRUD operations (being invoked by the presentation tier) in the session facade itself and will use SLSB DAO only if specialised business logic is required.

[Pratik Bhavsar]

Will transaction propagation occur if using unmanaged POJO as DAO?

[Rishi Shehrawat]

Yes, if the transaction has been started by the method calling the DAO.