3.6. Externally-Controlled Connections

If a transactional application's transaction states are managed by an application server, its resources must also be managed by the application server so that transaction association is performed properly. If an application is associated with a transaction, it is incorrect for the application to perform transactional work through the connection without having the connection’s resource object already associated with the global transaction. The application server must associate the XAResource object in use with the transaction by invoking the Transaction.enlistResource method.

If a server-side transactional application retains its database connection across multiple client requests, the application server must enlist the resource with the application's current transaction context. In this way, the application server manages the connection resource usage status across multiple method invocations.