Its not really the profile service that has to deal with this. Its the DeploymentTemplates and ManagedObjects defined by the deployers as these need to be in synch with the way the deployers handle metadata. Right now the DataSource management layer is just hacked in as an override by profile service local classes. In general, a parsing deployer translates a descriptor into a pojo metadata view, and operations on the metadata view may or may not affect the descriptor. It depends on how the ManagedObject/ManagedProperty instances handle changes. Typically I would expect that the descriptor simply becomes obsolete as it would be overriden by the pojo metadata view. The persistent form of the pojo metadata view may be java serialized objects, another xml document, or something else. This is an implementation detail of the DeploymentRepository currently. The current file based DeploymentRepository implementation defines an AttachmentsSerializer spi to control this. As I go through the OSGi bundle repository notions I'll refactor this. After that I need to go through and update the profile service diagrams to show how all the pieces fit together in terms of how the deployment metadata is built up. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4041216#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...