Inconsistently passing by reference

[ewilliams]

I have two stateless session beans (call them A and B) in the same deployable unit, which has been included in an EAR. Their implementations share the same package, as do their interfaces. They are configured identically in the deployment descriptor.

Both A and B rely on pass-by-reference, so it's critical that method parameters are not (de)serialized. I know this is bad practice, but I'm supporting legacy code.

Bean A is used by clients outside of its EAR, and bean B is used by bean A.

My ejb-deployer.xml contains true.

The problem is that pass-by-reference works fine between bean A and its clients, but does not work at all between bean B and bean A.

Any ideas as to what might be happening here? Please let me know if you need more details...

Thanks,
Eric

[ewilliams]

I meant to say, my ejb-deployer.xml contains

<attribute name="CallByValue">true</attribute>

[ewilliams]

Sorry, it looks like I may have jumped the gun when I posted this question. Apparently call-by-value is being used in both cases... that fact was just obfuscated by the way the EJB code is written.

Now I just have to figure out why pass-by-value is always being used with these local invocations. I modified ejb-deployer.xml but it had no impact...

Thanks,
Eric