Injecting EJB3.0 Beans into JSF2.0 Backing Beans... Impossible?

Question

I'm working on a JSF project on Weblogic 11g, and our initial design is calling for JSF Backing Beans to invoke EJB3.0 beans to perform business logic and data access calls. The @EJB annotation doesn't seem to work in my project when I try to inject the EJB reference to the backing bean. Whenever I hit the class that I am testing, the constructor for my EJB is never called and I end up with a NPE. Is it possible to inject an EJB3.0 bean into a JSF backing bean? Is there another way I should be invoking an EJB through the JSF Backing bean? What is the best practice?

Answer 1

I googled somewhat and this indeed seems to be a known issue with Weblogic. Lot of similar topics are kept unanswered.

I found this blog which confirms that @EJB in Weblogic only works for resources definied by web.xml, not for JSF. The blog describes also in detail a workaround using ServletContextListener which is IMO not much better than using JNDI.

I also found this OTN topic which confirms that @EJB in Weblogic started to work when EJB modules are not included in subdirectories (see the answer posted at the bottom, Feb 15, 2011 5:44 PM).

Answer 2

It turns out that it is a Weblogic specific issue when deploying anything using JSF and EJB. I found this post on the Oracle forums that explains how to get the @EJB injection working in JSF Managed Beans using Weblogic 11g:

EJB3.0 Injection into JSF Managed beans

UPDATE:

After spinning my wheels for too long, I have to give up trying to inject an EJB into a JSF ManagedBean on Weblogic 11g. Seems to work fine in Tomcat. Maybe the EJB3 and JSF implementation will be better in 12G...