The problem is one of leakage when the order of processing attachments is not defined. e.g. More explicitly, imagine an ear that contains an ear where the inner ear doesn't have an application.xml it would see the application.xml of the containing ear. This is why I described the current behaviour as a hack. It only works because the component deployers are at the end and they only process the specific component attachments/metadata So there is no deployer that will look at a component and reprocess the parent's metadata. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3985411#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...