Whew - talk about a healthy response to a post! :-) First though, back on to the main topic of marshalled values - Brian, I hope to have this in 2.1.0.CR3, which means you will have it for JBoss AS 5 clustering. I hope to have it enabled by default, too - let me know if this causes any issues with you. So back to the "new" topic of custom objects in Fqns! ;) I think a PFER check on a node attribute can be done just as easily as with a node - the current PFER code does a peek() and tests for a null return value. This could then do a getDirect() for specific attribs. I'm not entirely convinced about the UUID approach for entities though. Entities already have an identity - a primary key. Could we not use the entity's PK instead of UUIDs? Surely every entity PK must be mappable to DB primitives in some way, and if it is a composite PK, could we not combine the components in a Collection? This would ensure that the same ID is used cluster-wide and prevent collisions/lock timeouts as well as the need for a "dupe cleanup" thread... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4118117#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...