12.8.1. Commit Options

Central to the loading process are the commit options, which control when the data for an entity expires. JBoss supports four commit options A, B, C and D. The first three are described in the Enterprise JavaBeans Specification, but the last one is specific to JBoss. A detailed description of each commit option follows:

A : JBoss assumes it is the sole user of the database; therefore, JBoss can cache the current value of an entity between transactions, which can result is substantial performance gains. As a result of this assumption, no data managed by JBoss can be changed outside of JBoss. For example, changing data in another program or with the use of direct JDBC (even within JBoss) will result in an inconsistent database state.
B : JBoss assumes that there is more than one user of the database but keeps the context information about entities between transactions. This context information is used for optimizing loading of the entity. This is the default commit option.
C : JBoss discards all entity context information at the end of the transaction.
D : This is a JBoss specific commit option. This option is similar to commit option A, except that the data only remains valid for a specified amount of time.

The commit option is declared in the jboss.xml file. For a detailed description of this file see Chapter 11, EJBs on JBoss . The following example changes the commit option to A for all entity beans in the application:

<jboss>
    <container-configurations>
        <container-configuration>
            <container-name>Standard CMP 2.x EntityBean</container-name>
            <commit-option>A</commit-option>
        </container-configuration>
    </container-configurations>
</jboss>

Example 12.2. The jboss.xml Commit Option Declaration