Ok, I'll take a look at what you did when I have time. You probably did it wrong, but that's ok. ;-) Like I said on a different thread (in the POJO forum), the real solution is to provide two different views of the metadata. 1) The particular level that is modifiable, e.g. the AOP instance annotations e.g. (scope key) instance=SomeInstanceId 2) The tree structure that is used at runtime and is read only instance=SomeInstanceId,class=com.acme.Blah,deployment=whatever.jar,etc. this is made up on the particular levels defined in (1) The repository needs to contain both views. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3983212#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...