Inserting a tree of value objects

Question

Let's say I have these entities in my database:
Person
personId (PK)
firstName
lastName
PhoneNumber
phoneNumberId (PK)
number
description
personId (FK referencing Person entity)
I have a PersonValueObject class with the following attributes:
Integer personId
String firstName
String lastName
Collection phoneNumbers (a collection of PhoneNumberValueObject's - can be populated or set to null, depending on use case)
I have a PhoneNumberValueObject class with the following attributes:
Integer phoneNumberId
String number
Strong description
Integer personId
PersonValueObject person (can be populated or set to null, depending on the use case)
I have session facade with the following methods
createPerson(PersonValueObject personVO)
createPhoneNumber(PhoneNumberValueObject phoneNumberVO)
My question is, how should I insert a tree containing a Person and his related PhoneNumbers? I see three options:
1) The session facade's client calls createPerson(), which inserts the personVO and then the session facade traverses the personVO.phoneNumbers collection and calls createPhoneNumber() internally for every element in the collection. This means that the createPerson() method must have extra code to traverse the collection.
2) The session facade's client calls createPerson(), which inserts the personVO. Next, the session facade's client traverses the personVO.phoneNumbers collection and calls createPhoneNumber() for every element in the collection. This means that the client must have extra code to traverse the collection.
3) Add a third method called createPersonTree(PersonValueObject personVO), which internally calls createPerson() and then internally calls createPhoneNumber(). In this case, the createPersonTree() method must have the extra code to traverse the collection. The way I see it, the advantage of this approach is that the session facade's client has a choice of calling createPersonTree(), if it needs to insert a whole tree, whereas it can just call createPhoneNumber() directly if it just needs to add a new phone number to an existing person.
Comments?

Answer 1

1) Are you using session Bean for inserting the data?
2) Are you using the Entity Beans, I mean BMP?
3) Have you looked in the features provided by the
CMP2.0.Let me explain all the patterns I am using. The client is a regular java class that implements the "business delegate" pattern. The business delegate communicates with a session bean that is implementing the "session facade" pattern. It is this session facade that has those methods I referred to above, namely createPerson(), createPhoneNumber() and potentially createPersonTree(). The session facade communicates with a Person entity bean and a PhoneNumber entity bean, which implement the persistence layer. Both of these entity beans use EJB 2.0 CMR and CMP. The actual inserts are performed by these entity beans. For example, inside the session facade's createPerson() method, the session facade delegates the actual insert to the Person entity bean.
Data is passed between objects by using the "value object" pattern. For example, the business delegate passes person data to the session facade inside a Person value object. The session facade also passes this value object to the entity bean (alternatively, the session facade could pass the person's attributes individually, but I thought this was not as convenient).
I hope that explains the situation.