[JBoss-user] CMP entity bean relationships?

[Donald B. <ba...@we...>]

Hi guys. I'm quite new to jboss and the world of EJB, but i think i've got
a fairly good handle on things - got jboss-2.1 installed and running,
developed a few little entity beans, convinced JAWS to use postgresql as a
backend, etc. hooray, jboss is good stuff. i'm having trouble making it do
dependencies between by entity beans though. i started with a simple set
of 'news site' beans - Article, Author, Section. each Article must have
one Author and one Section. my ArticleBean class has these fields:

  public int id;
  public String title;
  public String content;
  public Section section;
  public Author author;

if my deployment descriptor ignores the bean references, all is hunky
dory:

    <entity>
      <description>
        A news article
      </description>
      <ejb-name>Article</ejb-name>
      <home>com.webslingerZ.news.beans.ArticleHome</home>
      <remote>com.webslingerZ.news.beans.Article</remote>
      <ejb-class>com.webslingerZ.news.beans.ArticleBean</ejb-class>
      <persistence-type>Container</persistence-type>

<prim-key-class>com.webslingerZ.news.beans.ArticlePK</prim-key-class>
      <reentrant>False</reentrant>
      <cmp-field><field-name>id</field-name></cmp-field>
      <cmp-field><field-name>title</field-name></cmp-field>
      <cmp-field><field-name>content</field-name></cmp-field>
    </entity>

but if I add the Author and Section to the cmp-fields:

      <cmp-field><field-name>Author</field-name></cmp-field>
      <cmp-field><field-name>Section</field-name></cmp-field>

i get exciting stack dumps in the jboss stdout:

[Verifier] Verifying
file:/home/balld/src/jboss/dist/tmp/deploy/Default/news.jar/ejb1001.jar
[Container factory] Deploying Article
[Container factory] Deploying Section
[Container factory] Deploying Author
[Container factory] org.jboss.ejb.DeploymentException: cmp-field Section
is not a field in ejb class com.webslingerZ.news.beans.ArticleBean
[Container factory]     at
org.jboss.ejb.plugins.jaws.metadata.CMPFieldMetaData.verifyNestedField(CMPFieldMetaData.java:206)

i was given to understand that ejb-1.1 allowed bean references to be
container-managed fields. does jboss not support this, or am i doing this
the wrong way? is there a different preferred way to do this, e.g.
storing a PK or a Handle to the dependent entity beans?

- donald