Two related issues in terms of the profile service being able to run a deployment through all deployers to avoid having to make assumptions about at what level the metadata that can be edited is available. The first is that the kernel lifecycle actions need to be stubbed out to be noops to avoid any actual beans being created. When the profile service is in the server, how can this be done? This also requires separate notions of transient attachments as already requested by Bill. There should be attachments that are candiates for overrides and saving/serialization and those that are not. I think we need a terminology reorg so that: - transient attachments are metadata that are not serialized or candiates for overriding by admin ManagedObjects. - attachments are metadata that can be serialized and overriden by admin ManagedObjects. - managed objects are metadata overrides of the attachments metadata. A Deployer that uses transient attachments would need to check for these and recreate these from the attachment and other input as needed. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4005038#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...