EJB.16.3 Application Assembler s Responsibility

EJB.16.3 Application Assembler's Responsibility

The application assembler assembles enterprise beans into a single deployment unit. The application assembler's input is one or more EJB JAR files provided by one or more bean providers, and the output is also one or more EJB JAR files. The application assembler can combine multiple input EJB JAR files into a single output EJB JAR file, or split an input EJB JAR file into multiple output EJB JAR files. Each output EJB JAR file is either a deployment unit intended for the deployer or a partially assembled application that is intended for another application assembler.

The bean provider and application assembler may be the same person or organization. In such a case, the person or organization performs the responsibilities described in both this and the previous sections.

The application assembler may modify the following information that was specified by the bean provider:

• Enterprise bean's name . The application assembler may change the enterprise bean's name defined in the ejb-name element.

• Values of environment entries. The application assembler may change existing and/or define new values of environment properties.

• Description fields. The application assembler may change existing or create new description elements.

The application assembler must not, in general, modify any other information listed in Section EJB.16.2 that was provided in the input EJB JAR file.

In addition, the application assembler may, but is not required to, specify any of the following application assembly information:

• Binding of enterprise bean references. The application assembler may link an enterprise bean reference to another enterprise bean in the EJB JAR file. The application assembler creates the link by adding the ejb-link element to the referencing bean.

• Security roles. The application assembler may define one or more security roles. The security roles define the recommended security roles for the clients of the enterprise beans. The application assembler defines the security roles using the security-role elements.

• Method permissions. The application assembler may define method permissions. Method permission is a binary relation between the security roles and the methods of the remote and home interfaces of the enterprise beans. The application assembler defines method permissions using the method-permission elements.

• Linking of security role references. If the application assembler defines security roles in the deployment descriptor, the application assembler must link the security role references declared by the bean provider to the security roles. The application assembler defines these links using the role-link element.

• Transaction attributes. The application assembler may define the value of the transaction attributes for the methods of the remote and home interfaces of the enterprise beans that require container-managed transaction demarcation . All entity beans and the session beans declared by the bean provider as transaction-type Container require container-managed transaction demarcation. The application assembler uses the container-transaction elements to declare the transaction attributes.

If an input EJB JAR file contains application assembly information, the application assembler is allowed to change the application assembly information supplied in the input EJB JAR file. (This could happen when the input EJB JAR file was produced by another application assembler.)

The deployment descriptor produced by the bean provider must be well formed in the XML sense, and valid with respect to the DTD in Section EJB.16.5. The content of the deployment descriptor must conform to the semantic rules specified in the DTD comments and elsewhere in this specification. The deployment descriptor must refer to the DTD using the following statement:

 <!DOCTYPE EJB JAR PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.  //DTD Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1//EN" "http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/ejb- jar_1_1.dtd">