Developing a J2EE application to use ActivitySessions

This topic provides an overview of the scenarios for which you would develop a J2EE application to use an ActivitySession.

The following common J2EE application scenarios make use of an ActivitySession:

Developing a J2EE application to use one or more enterprise beans that are persisted to non-transactional datastores.
This scenario can be used by an application that needs to coordinate multiple one-phase resource managers; for example, for two or more entity EJBs whose persistence is delegated to LocalTransaction resource adapters.
In this scenario, the enterprise beans used by the application have an Activation policy of ActivitySession and a local transaction containment policy with a boundary of ActivitySession and resolution-control of ContainerAtBoundary. The synchronization of the EJB state data is synchronized, by the container, with the one-phase resource managers at ActivitySession completion and no application code is required to be aware of ActivitySession support.
Developing a J2EE application in which an enterprise bean accesses a resource manager multiple times in different business methods.
This scenario can be used by an application that needs to extend a resource manager local transaction (RMLT) over several business methods of an enterprise bean instance.
In this scenario, the enterprise beans used by the application have an Activation policy of ActivitySession and a local transaction containment policy with a boundary of ActivitySession and resolution-control of Application. The application logic starts and ends the RMLTs, for example using the javax.resource.cci.LocalTransaction interface offered by a LocalTransaction Connector, but is not constrained to start and commit the LocalTransaction in the same method.
Developing a J2EE client application to use an ActivitySession to scope EJB activation and load-balancing.
This scenario can be used by an application client that needs to access an entity bean instance several times in the same client session, either without needing to run under a transaction context, or with the need to run under a number of distinct and serially-executed transactions.
In this scenario, the enterprise beans used by the application client have an Activation policy of ActivitySession and a local transaction containment policy appropriate to the function of the enterprise bean. The J2EE client application can represent a period of user activity, for example a signon period, during which a number of interactions occur with one or more enterprise beans. If the J2EE client application begins an ActivitySession and invokes the enterprise beans within the scope of the UOW represented by the ActivitySession, then the enterprise bean instances are activated by the container on the ActivitySession boundary and remain in the active state until passivated by the container at the end of the ActivitySession. Workload affinity management based on the ActivitySession is a platform quality of service. Global transactions can begin and end within the ActivitySession, if they are wholly encapsulated by the ActivitySession and run serially. EJB instances activated at the ActivitySession boundary remain active across the serial global transactions.
Developing a Web application client to participate in an ActivitySession context.
A web application that runs in the WebSphere Web container can participate in an ActivitySession context. Web applications can use the UserActivitySession interface to begin and end an ActivitySession context. Also, the ActivitySession can be associated with an HttpSession, thereby extending access to the ActivitySession over multiple HTTP invocations and supporting EJB activation periods that can be determined by the lifecycle of the web HTTP client.
The Web container manages ActivitySessions based on deployment descriptor attributes associated with the Web application module.

General considerations:

An application that is accessed under an ActivitySession context can receive a javax.transaction.InvalidTransactionException RemoteException, thrown by the EJB container when servicing any application method. This exception occurs when an instance of an enterprise bean that has an ActivitySession-based activation policy becomes involved with concurrent global and local transactions.
To enable an enterprise bean to participate in an ActivitySession context and support ActivitySession-based operations, it must be configured with an ActivationPolicy of ACTIVITY_SESSION. A bean configured with ActivationPolicy of either TRANSACTION or ONCE cannot participate in ActivitySession context.
A session bean can either use container-managed ActivitySessions or implement bean-managed ActivitySessions; entity beans can only use container-managed ActivitySessions. A bean is deployed to be bean-managed or container-managed with respect to ActivitySession management by setting its transaction type deployment attribute to be bean-managed or container-managed when deploying the enterprise bean. A bean that uses bean-managed transactions can use bean-managed ActivitySessions; a bean that uses container-managed transactions can use container-managed ActivitySessions.
If you want a session bean or J2EE client to manage its own ActivitySessions, write the code that explicitly demarcates the boundaries of an ActivitySession, as described in Developing an enterprise bean or J2EE client to manage ActivitySessions.

For examples of using ActivitySessions in J2EE applications, see ActivitySessions samples.