You can definitely do this from a filter. I have a servlet that gets an EntityManager. It must get a transaction to work! It can do queries without a transaction but it cannot do writes without one. As for why it can't find a transaction, I have no idea. Maybe post some of your persistence configuration stuff? With my setup it works no problem, and a Servlet is not very different from a Filter. But in general, most things like that should happen in Seam components. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3999343#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...