UserTransaction not available to non-EE threads

JBoss Seam offers Asynchronous behaviour for non-EJB environments using a Quartz dispatcher. Asynchronous behaviour may also make use of Seam's @Transactional marker to demarcate tx boundaries.

Since testing one of our applications in AS7 I noticed Seam "could not discover transaction status" error messages reported as our application ran async sections of code.

Examining the Seam code, I could see that Seam would make two attempts to access a JNDI UserTransaction resource:

1 - context.lookup("java:comp/UserTransaction");

If an NameNotFoundException is thrown, then attempt:

2 - context.lookup("UserTransaction");

Under AS6 and below, the latter attempt would succeed. Under AS7 attempts are currently failing.

While looking into this issue I came across the following developer discussion which suggests that it might be possible to add a "java:/jboss/UserTransaction" resource:

http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/jboss-as7-dev/2011-June/002298.html

Further discussion on my AS7 user forum thread lead to the suggestion that I myself might add this behaviour.

I have followed the implementation hints and light testing has been successful (with appropriate mods to Seam to use the new resource name). I aim to perform some more thorough testing on this shortly and submit a patch against this issue.