The components provided by the Seam application framework may be used in one of two different approaches. The first way is to install and configure an instance of the component in components.xml, just like we have done with other kinds of built-in Seam components. For example, the following fragment from components.xml installs a component which can perform basic CRUD operations for a Contact entity:

<framework:entity-home name="personHome" 
                       entity-class="eg.Person" 
                       entity-manager="#{personDatabase}">
    <framework:id>#{param.personId}</framework:id>
</framework:entity-home>

If that looks a bit too much like "programming in XML" for your taste, you can use extension instead:

@Stateful
@Name("personHome")
public class PersonHome extends EntityHome<Person> implements LocalPersonHome {
    @RequestParameter String personId;
    @In EntityManager personDatabase;
    
    public Object getId() { return personId; }
    public EntityManager getEntityManager() { return personDatabase; }
    
}

The second approach has one huge advantage: you can easily add extra functionality, and override the built-in functionality (the framework classes were carefully designed for extension and customization).

A second advantage is that your classes may be EJB stateful sessin beans, if you like. (They do not have to be, they can be plain JavaBean components if you prefer.)

At this time, the Seam Application Framework provides just four built-in components: EntityHome and HibernateEntityHome for CRUD, along with EntityQuery and HibernateEntityQuery for queries.

The Home and Query components are written so that they can function with a scope of session, event or conversation. Which scope you use depends upon the state model you wish to use in your application.

The Seam Application Framework only works with Seam-managed persistence contexts. By default, the components will look for a persistence context named entityManager.