You need to make design decisions for your particular app. Certainly using a extended SMPC in the booking example would have been possible, but just not how it was designed. Instead entities become detached and have to be merged to become managed again. It's destroyed at the end of the session. The container managed the entity manager lifecycle, so no, it doesn't need to be closed. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4113357#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...