This is what I was trying to drill into as well. The profile service is the service that returns the managment interface it obtains from the deployment by parsing it, and when updates are done, its done via a crud view of the profile service. There are different ways this can be handled. What we talked about was: 1. The profile service runs the deployment through the the deployment chain up to the metadata parsing phase to obtain the deployment specified metadata. This is why its important for component deployers to properly separate metadata parsing into stages. This is stored as an attachment associated with the deployment in the repository. 2. When there is an update via the crud interface, the profile service takes this metadata, clones it, and applies the managed object changes to it. This is stored as an override in the repository. 3. When the profile service is asked for the DeploymentContexts associated with a DeplomentUnit, it attaches the approriate metadata as a predetermined attachment. 4. A deployer querying DeploymentUnit.getAttachment will see the overriden, predetermined instance. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3992367#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...