The JBoss specific jboss.xml EJB deployment descriptor affects EJB references in two ways. First, the jndi-name child element of the session and entity elements allows the user to specify the deployment JNDI name for the EJB home interface. In the absence of a jboss.xml specification of the jndi-name for an EJB, the home interface is bound under the ejb-jar.xml ejb-name value. For example, the session EJB with the ejb-name of ShoppingCartBean in Example 4.7, “An example ejb-jar.xml ejb-ref descriptor fragment” would have its home interface bound under the JNDI name ShoppingCartBean in the absence of a jboss.xml jndi-name specification.

The second use of the jboss.xml descriptor with respect to ejb-refs is the setting of the destination to which a component's ENC ejb-ref refers. The ejb-link element cannot be used to refer to EJBs in another enterprise application. If your ejb-ref needs to access an external EJB, you can specify the JNDI name of the deployed EJB home using the jboss.xml ejb-ref/jndi-name element.

The jboss-web.xml descriptor is used only to set the destination to which a Web application ENC ejb-ref refers. The content model for the JBoss ejb-ref is as follows:

Example 4.9, “An example jboss.xml ejb-ref fragment” provides an example jboss.xml descriptor fragment that illustrates the following usage points:

<!-- ... -->
<session>
    <ejb-name>ProductBeanUser</ejb-name>
    <ejb-ref>
        <ejb-ref-name>ejb/ProductHome</ejb-ref-name>
        <jndi-name>
                     jboss/store/ProductHome
                  </jndi-name>
    </ejb-ref>
</session>
                        
<entity>
    <ejb-name>ProductBean</ejb-name>
    <jndi-name>
                     jboss/store/ProductHome
                  </jndi-name>
     <!-- ... -->
</entity>
<!-- ... -->