Hi, according to the ejb persistence spec (chapter 3.2.4): anonymous wrote : A detached entity may result from transaction commit if a transaction-scoped container-managed entity manager is used (see section 3.3); from transaction rollback (see section 3.3.2); from clearing the persistence context; from closing an entity manager; and from serializing an entity or otherwise passing an entity by value, e.g. to a separate application tier, through a remote interface, etc. Does any of those cases apply to your app? You have the special case that the EntityManager is only in "Bean1", so I don't know whether calling a method from "Bean2" means that the persistence context is cleared afterwards. Here is something from chapter 5.6.1, but this does not make it much clearer: anonymous wrote : A new persistence context begins when the container-managed entity manager is invoked in the scope of an active JTA transaction, and there is no current persistence context already associated with | the JTA transaction. The persistence context is created and then associated with the JTA transaction. | | The persistence context ends when the associated JTA transaction commits or rolls back, and all entities that were managed by the EntityManager become detached. | | If the entity manager is invoked outside the scope of a transaction, any entities loaded from the database will immediately become detached at the end of the method call. Hope this helps a bit Wolfgang View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4190393#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...