It turned out that the @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO) worked just fine. The problem with my code was that I had a constructor that takes in the message. In order for the id to be generated by the Persistent layer, I needed to construct the object using the default constructor and then used the setter to set the message attribute. Thanks for the help. Regards, Tony View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4024453#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...