Wanted: Entity EJBs With Configurable Attributes

[Jim Bowman]

I am working on a prototype whose current architecture includes servlets and
an EJB server. We are using both Entity EJBs and state-less Session EJBs.
Everything has come together quite easily developing an Entity EJB for each
business object in the domain model and a Session EJB for each use case.

Now we have just gotten a use case to allow the user to add custom attributes
to some of the business objects. For now, the attributes just need to be
viewable. (Later we might need to query by them.) Rebuilding the EJBs is
not an acceptable option.

What can we do? (The only thing that I have come up with is to add an array
to the configurable Entity EJBs that can contain name-value pairs.)

Jim

[Ilja Preuß]

"Jim Bowman" <jbowman@axiomsys.com> wrote:
>What can we do? (The only thing that I have come up with is to add an array
>to the configurable Entity EJBs that can contain name-value pairs.)

Another option could be a Hashtable or Properties instead of the array (see
java.util package). The best choice mainly depends on how you would like
to manage persistence (or what options of container-managed persistence your
server offers).