How to use same transaction when calling CMP entity beans and DAO (JDBC)

Question

We are currently using Weblogic 8.1 SP2 with an Oracle 10g database (using XA thin and non-XA drivers).
We have a session bean that invokes an entity bean and a DAO (data access object pattern) in order to add data in 2 separate tables (account and history). Rows are added to the first (account) table using a CMP Entity bean while inserts are done in the 2nd (history) table using a DAO. Here is some pseudo code:
addHistorySessionBean (trans-attribute="Required")
begin
Step #1 - call addAccountEntityBean (trans- attribute="Required")
Step #2 - call addHistoryDAO (get datasource, connection)
end
The 2nd table (history) has a foreign key constraint to ensure that the corresponding key exists in the first (account) table. Unfortunately, DAO inserts on the 2nd (history) table fail with a foreign key constraint violation (INTEGRITY CONSTRAINT VIOLATION - PARENT KEY NOT FOUND!) since they cannot see the row added to the 1st (account) table in step #1 by the CMP entity bean.
How does one ensure that all this is done in a single transaction ? It appears that the app server creates two seperate transactions (one for the session bean facade and the entity bean and a 2nd transaction (when we retrieve a connection using the same data source JNDI name) for the DAO.
A post on server side suggested using a "<resource-ref>" in the session bean to tie the two potentially separate transactions together, but that does not work for us. However, I am not sure if we are doing that correctly. After we define the resource ref in the session facade bean, do we use the resource ref "name" attribute to lookup the datasource or do we still lookup the datasource by JNDI name ? Do we need to define the resource-ref tag in the entity bean also ?
Does Weblogic allow using a single transaction for this type of a scenario ? How does one specify within Weblogic that the same transaction should be utilized by the entity bean and any subsequent DAOs?
People have also suggested that we defer constraint checking until the transaction(s) are committed but that sounds like a work acount without addressing this issue. Would postponing the constraint checking in Oracle cause any additional overhead ?
Any suggestions with specific examples or documentation on how to address this issue will be gratefully appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately, this does not work since it appears that there are 2 separate transactions going on here. One, the original one initiated by the session bean and used by the entity bean and the other initiated by the DAO. Any other ideas appreciated.
Hi,
Try setting the delay-database-inserts tag to
ejbCreate in RDBMS descriptor file.
http://bernal/stage/wls/docs81/ejb/DDreference-cmp-jar
.html#1113981
vasanthi ramesh