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ActivitySession and transaction contexts

This topic describes the hierarchical relationship between transaction and ActivitySession contexts. This relationship, defined by the ActivitySession service, requires that any transaction context be either wholly inside or wholly outside an ActivitySession context.

An ActivitySession context is very similar to a transaction context and extends the lifecycle choices for activation of enterprise beans; it can encapsulate one or more transactions. The ActivitySession context is a distributed context that, like the transaction context, can be bean- or container-managed. An ActivitySession context is used mainly by a client to scope the lifecycle of an enterprise bean that it uses either beyond or in the absence of individual transactions started by that client.

ActivitySessions have a lower overhead than transactions and can be used instead of transactions that are only used to scope the lifecycle of a called enterprise bean. For a bean with an activation policy of ActivitySession, the duration of any resource manager local transactions (RMLTs) started by that bean can be bounded by the duration of the ActivitySession instead of the bean method in which the RMLT was started. This provides flexibility and potential for using RMLTs in an enterprise bean beyond the scenarios described in the EJB specifications. The EJB specifications define that RMLTs need to be completed before the end of the bean method, because the bean method is the only containment boundary for local transactions available in those specifications.

The following rules defines the relationship between transactions and ActivitySessions.


Related concepts

  • ActivitySession service APIs

  • Usage model for using ActivitySessions with HTTP sessions
  • ActivitySession and transaction container policies in combination Concept topic