I like to keep my entities clean. Just get/set/toString/equals/hashcode. So I'd put the @Factory on a method in your controller/action/manager Bean. If you need some heavyweight resources that you'd like to clean up, you can use the manager pattern and the @Unwrap annotation. In the case of the manager pattern you have an additional bean dedicated to managing this contextual variable. For the most part though, if I'm simply going to initialize a variable that I'll use later within a controller's action method, putting the @Factory on a method within the controller is the way I go. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4039403#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...