Container-Managed Entity Managers

With a container-managed entity manager, an EntityManager instance’s persistence context is automatically propagated by the container to all application components that use the EntityManager instance within a single Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) transaction.

JTA transactions usually involve calls across application components. To complete a JTA transaction, these components usually need access to a single persistence context. This occurs when an EntityManager is injected into the application components by means of the javax.persistence.PersistenceContext annotation. The persistence context is automatically propagated with the current JTA transaction, and EntityManager references that are mapped to the same persistence unit provide access to the persistence context within that transaction. By automatically propagating the persistence context, application components don’t need to pass references to EntityManager instances to each other in order to make changes within a single transaction. The Java EE container manages the life cycle of container-managed entity managers.

To obtain an EntityManager instance, inject the entity manager into the application component:

@PersistenceContext
EntityManager em;