Fantastic, that's the way I'll proceed then. For something like this, where would you suggest having the factory? I don't really like adding that into the datamodel piece (although that seems to be very common for example-scale apps); is it more realistic to have a generic Factory class that contains all of these types of factories, or is it better to have smaller, more specific ones (or should I just embrace the future and have a factory method on the entity bean)? Thanks for the advice, by the way. Very useful. It also seems like for most conversations I should be using SMPC rather than PersistenceContext (from this and other threads) - is that a valid take-away from this as well? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4081039#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...