Turns out I was wrong, the Entity Bean was recently changed to Requres. So what happens is this

SLSB starts TX1

Entity creates record within TX1

record.getProperties() starts new TX2 and calls update and commit at end of TX2, and here lock happens

the question remains why record.getProperties() spawns new TX

Edit: the Bean was not changed to Required. I was mislead by the fact that in reallity JBoss uses Required even though it is RequiresNew!

after Entity.create(...) is executed the record is not visible in DB, so it may really be using Required.

daniel

Fixed my problem, after debug session of JBoss code it turned out that the code that parses TX attributes produces wrong info.

we had the folowing in ejb-jar.xml

<method>

     <ejb-name>SomeEjb</ejb-name>

     <method-name>*</method-name>

</method>

...

<trans-attribute>RequiresNew</trans-attribute>

Specified like that JBoss set default TX attribute Required to all LOCAL_HOME methods (ejbCreate/Find/Select/Home)

and RequiresNew to all Bean methods such as toString(), hashCode()...

by adding <method-intf>LocalHome</method-intf>

<method>

     <ejb-name>SomeEjb</ejb-name>

     <method-intf>LocalHome</method-intf>

     <method-name>*</method-name>

</method>

all went to normal, my ejbCreate() started new transaction, and getProperties() method did not use TX interceptor.

So it looks like different or wrong loginc in JBoss, the code itself states it has some problems, and it looks targeted at EJB 3.x, it is not a separate code for 2.x

daniel