Chris Thompson

• Sep 18th, 2005

 

The primary key is the only way the container has of distinguishing one bean from another. This is particularly important for pooling, where the container uses the primary key to determine if the data you need already exists in the bean pool. To quote Roman in Mastering EJBs (3rd ed.), "Finder methods locate one or more existing entity bean data instances in the underlying persistent store. You must define at least one finder method -- ejbFindByPrimaryKey()."