Composite entity pattern

Composite entity is a Java EE Software design pattern and it is used to model, represent, and manage a set of interrelated persistent objects rather than representing them as individual fine-grained entity beans, and also a composite entity bean represents a graph of objects.

[1] According to Oracle description of the pattern, consequences include eliminating inter-entity relationships, improving manageability by reducing entity beans, improving network performance, reducing database schema dependency, increasing object granularity, facilitating composite transfer object creation and overhead of multi-level dependent object graphs.

[1] The fatal drawback is the requirement of bean-managed persistent (BMP) bean.

This involves more work for developers, and create some problems as follows: Composite entity pattern can only be implemented using BMP or by adding more hand-coded persistence logic to container managed persistence (CMP) beans.

[2] Sample code for a Professional Service Automation application (PSA) in which the resource object is implemented via composite entity pattern, may look like as follows (entity implements coarse-grained object): [1]