Support for primary key generation outside of the entity bean is available through custom implementations of the entity creation command objects used to insert entities into a persistent store. The list of available commands is specified in entity-commands element of the jbosscmp-jdbc.xml descriptor. The default entity-command may be specified in the jbosscmp-jdbc.xml in defaults element. Each entity element can override the entity-command in defaults by specifying its own entity-command. The content model of the entity-commands and child elements is given below.

Each entity-command element specifies an entity generation implementation. The name attribute specifies a name that allows the command defined in an entity-commands section to be referenced in the defaults and entity elements. The class attribute specifies the implementation of the org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc. JDBCCreateEntityCommand that supports the key generation. Database vendor specific commands typically subclass the org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc. JDBCIdentityColumnCreateCommand if the database generates the primary key as a side effect of doing an insert, or the org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc.JDBCInsertPKCreateCommand if the command must insert the generated key.

The optional attribute element(s) allows for the specification of arbitrary name/value property pairs that will be available to the entity command implementation class. The attribute element has a required name attribute that specifies the name property, and the attribute element content is the value of the property. The attribute values are accessible through the org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc.metadata.JDBCEntityCommandMetaData.getAttribute(String) method.