EJB Injection into JSR286 Portlet

Question

I'm currently facing an issue accessing an Stateless EJB from my JSR286 Weblogic 10.3.2 Portal Server. I have 2 ears: 1) PreferencesPortalEAR and 2)PreferencesEJBEar
PreferencesPortalEAR - contains the web module with jsr286 portlet and the ejb client jar
PreferencesEJBEar - contains the j2ee module with the ejb and ejb client jar
When I attempt to access the EJB from the portlet doing a JNDI lookup it works fine but when I try to use DI to get a reference to the bean I get a NullPointerException.
Here's the code:
PreferenceBean EJB:
* Session Bean implementation class PreferencesBean
@Stateless(mappedName="ejb/Preference")
public class PreferenceBean implements PreferenceLocal, PreferenceRemote {
     @Override
     public void createPreference(List<PreferenceEntity> preferences) {
          System.out.println("Created Preference");
     @Override
     public void deletePreference(List<PreferenceEntity> preferences) {
          System.out.println("Deleted Preference");
     @Override
     public List<PreferenceEntity> getPreference(PreferenceType prefType) {
          System.out.println("Get Preference");
          ArrayList<PreferenceEntity> peAL = new ArrayList<PreferenceEntity>();
          for (int i=0;i<10;i++) {
               PreferenceEntity pe = new PreferenceEntity();
               pe.setId(i);
               pe.setCreateDate(new Date());
               pe.setPreferenceName("prefName" + i);
               pe.setPreferenceValue("prefValue"+i);
               pe.setUserName("weblogic"+i);
               peAL.add(pe);
          return peAL;
     @Override
     public void updatePreference(List<PreferenceEntity> preferences) {
          System.out.println("Update Preference");
Here's the Portlet EJBPortlet:
public class EJBPortlet extends GenericPortlet {
     @EJB(mappedName="ejb/Preference")
     private Preference preference;
     public void doView(RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response)
               throws PortletException, IOException {
          response.setContentType("text/html");
//          Context ctx = null;
//          Preference preference = null;
//          try {
//               /** not needed when running locally **/
//               Hashtable<String, String> env = new Hashtable<String, String>();
//               env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,"weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");
//               env.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL,"weblogic");
//               env.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS,"weblogic123");
//               env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL,"t3://localhost:7001");
//               ctx = new InitialContext();
//               preference = (Preference) ctx.lookup("ejb/Preference#com.mycompany.preferences.PreferenceRemote");
//          } catch (Exception e) {
//               e.printStackTrace();
          preference.createPreference(null);
          preference.deletePreference(null);
          ArrayList<PreferenceEntity> peAL = (ArrayList<PreferenceEntity>)preference.getPreference(PreferenceType.CATEGORY);
          for (PreferenceEntity pe : peAL) {
               response.getWriter().write(pe.toString() + " ") ;
          response.getWriter().write("<p>Hello World!</p>");
As previously mentioned, using InitialContext and JNDI lookup in the portlet works fine. When that code is commented and I use @EJB, I get a NullPointerException.
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

We tried almost every permutation and combination, but it did not work without that dummy servlet.
Then we had to look for a cleaner solution and we found one.
We are now using spring injection, to get the EJB injection in our session managed bean. This way the code is extensible and cleaner.
In future if you want something else(other than ejb lets say a web service), you will just change the Spring config file and it would't break anything.
Edited by: desu on Mar 14, 2008 4:20 AM