CMR collection persistence question

[pluellen]

I'm running jboss-3.0.0RC3 with MySQL as a datasource and am having trouble with implementing a unidirectional, many-to-many relationship.

I have two EJBs, User and Role that have a many-to-many relationship. Users know about their Roles. Roles do not know about their Users.
My UserBean has these accessors for roles

public abstract Collection getRoles();
public abstract void setRoles(Collection roles);

In my jbosscmp-jdbc.xml file, I've declared the following:

<ejb-relation>
 <ejb-relation-name>UserAssociateWithRoles</ejb-relation-name>

 <relation-table-mapping>
 <table-name>user_role0</table-name>
 </relation-table-mapping>

 <ejb-relationship-role>
 <ejb-relationship-role-name>UserBeanToRoleBean</ejb-relationship-role-name>
 <key-fields>
 <key-field>
 <field-name>email</field-name>
 <column-name>user</column-name>
 </key-field>
 </key-fields>
 </ejb-relationship-role>

 <ejb-relationship-role>
 <ejb-relationship-role-name>RoleBeanToUserBean</ejb-relationship-role-name>
 <key-fields>
 <key-field>
 <field-name>name</field-name>
 <column-name>role</column-name>
 </key-field>
 </key-fields>
 </ejb-relationship-role>
</ejb-relation>

When I deploy my code (allowing jboss to create tables with names I've given), the table associating users and roles (user_role0) is created. Great! Only thing is, the table is never populated. Instead, the table representing my User EJB(user0 - which jboss created with a longblob column named roles) is updated.

How do I get jboss to append rows to the user_role0 table and not store the relationship to roles in the user0 longblob column?

[pluellen]

I figured out what was wrong.

I'd mistakenly left a container managed persistence declaration for a field roles in my ejb-jar deployment descriptor. I also had a cmr-field with the same name.

I guess the cmp-field declaration was over-riding the cmr-field declaration, and thereby gumming things up pretty good.