Defining Persistent Fields

The EJB 2.0 specification lets you designate an entity bean’s instance variables as CMP fields or CMR fields. You define these fields in the deployment descriptor. CMP fields are marked with the element cmp-field, while container-managed relationship fields are marked with the element cmr-field.

In the implementation class, note that you do not declare the CMP and CMR fields as public variables. Instead, you define get and set methods in the entity bean to retrieve and set the values of these CMP and CMR fields. In this sense, beans using the 2.0 CMP follow the JavaBeans model: instead of accessing instance variables directly, clients use the entity bean’s get and set methods to retrieve and set these instance variables. Keep in mind that the get and set methods only pertain to variables that have been designated as CMP or CMR fields.