Access intent is a WebSphere Application Server run-time service that enables you to more precisely manage an application's persistence. The access intent service defines a set of declarative annotations used by the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) container and its agents to make performance optimizations for entity bean access. These annotations are organized into sets called access intent policies.
Access intent policies contain a set of annotations considered as hints by the EJB container and its agents. Most access intent policies are hints representing high-level abstractions that can be mapped to a specific backend resource manager. It is the responsibility of the EJB persistence machinery to ensure the necessary concurrency control, connection, and cache management when carrying out the persistence details. The EJB persistence manager can use access intent hints to make better performance decisions when carrying out its assigned task. A smaller number of access intents are hints to the EJB container, influencing the management of EJB collections.
Although it is recommended that you always configure bean level access intent for your applications, if you find it necessary you can apply access intent policies to methods within the scope of an EJB module. In such cases the policy becomes the default access intent for all requests upon the configured methods.
You can also apply access intent policies to beans within the scope of application profiles. Consequently, you can configure beans with multiple and opposing access intent policies. The application profiling documentation explains in more detail how to configure an application to apply a particular access intent policy to a bean for one request, then apply another access intent policy to the same bean for a different request.