Put common functionality in EJB or not?

Question

There is a java program at my job which generates an HTML form "<form>...</form>" based on some criteria it received. This program is written as Stateless Session Bean. Lets call it "HTML Form Generator".
Now the module I am working on needs to call the "HTML Form Generator". My module has couple of Stateless Session Beans from where I needs to call the "HTML Form Generator".
Right now I am doing EJB to EJB call which is giving me the following warning in JBoss:
11:13:02,070 WARN [TxConnectionManager] Prepare called on a local tx. Use of local transactions on a jta transaction with more than one branch may result in inconsistent data in some cases of failure.
Any way to resolve this issue? I am thinking that the "HTML Form Generator" dont have to be in an EJB. Instead it can be in normal classes. What advantages I going to loose any thing if I recommend this approach?
Thanks

Answer 1

We have some rules which I cannot clasify whether
they belong in business layer or presentationlayer.
For example I have a rule that if the Status of arow
displayed is "Approved" or "Not Approved" thenmake
the whole row read-only. Now it appears to me a
business rule but the businees layer is sendingDTOs
to presentation layer. How can I sepcify suchtypes
of rule so that presentation layer knows what todo?
In your DTO bean, put in a method isReadOnly(). Your
business layer sets the value, and your view layer
interprets it and acts accordingly.Thanks. This makes sense. But there are some times complex rules: like if control 1's value is A then the control 2's value can only be C,D else X,Y,Z. OR if the User is not a Manager then hide the employee's Baes Rate. Stuff like that.
If one property in DTO bean represents one column of the web page then there can be potentially numerous proprties of that column. Does that mean every property in DTO bean is another class?
Another concern I have is how the DTO will match up with the HTML. Let me explain:
Suppose we have two different test cases: one is Employee and another one is Shift. We create EmployeeDTO and Shift DTO.
The business layer will create Lists of specific DTO type. So in 1st test case the business layer will return a List of EmployeeDTO type. In 2nd test case the business layer will return a List of ShiftDTO type.
Suppose the HTML Generator class have 1 method to generate HTML:
public String generateHTML(String pageName, List list);
where pageName is the name of the Page as defined in the database. Now I have 2 concerns:
1) how to know that which control in database belongs to which property in class?
2) when looping through the List and converting it to specific type will be a problem. How will i know that i have to convert to EmployeeDTO in first test case and ShiftDTO in second test case?
Thanks