Access intent's declarative functionality provides great power to you as a CMP entity bean developer. You can provide hints on how WebSphere Application Server is to manage the details of persistence without having to explicitly manage any of the persistence logic from within the application.
There are situations, however, in which you might need to develop BMP entity beans. Because the only meaningful difference between BMP and CMP components is who provides the persistence logic, BMP entity beans should be able to leverage access intent hints just as WebSphere Application Server does on behalf of CMP entity beans. BMP entity beans that use the access intent service participate in application profiling; that is, the value of the access intent attributes can differ from request to request, allowing the BMP entity bean to seamlessly modify its persistence strategy.
You can apply access intent policies to BMP entity bean methods as well as CMP entity bean methods. Because access intent hints are not contractual in nature, there is no obligation for a BMP entity bean to exploit them. BMP entity beans are expected to use only those access intent attributes that are important to that particular bean.
The current access intent policy is bound into the java:comp namespace for a particular BMP entity bean. That policy is current only for the duration of the method call during which the access intent policy was retrieved. In a typical scenario, you would cache the access type during invocation of the ejbLoad() method so that appropriate actions can be taken during invocation of the ejbStore() method.
Related information
AccessIntent interface
Task overview: Application profiling