CDI Passivation Uncovered

Frequently there is confusion about passivation of contextual instances with CDI, especially when non-passivating scopes such as request scoped are injected in passivatable once.

The specification defines passivation (serialization) capabilities, allowing the container to free memory by transferring idle objects to secondary storage when required.

The temporary transfer of the state of an idle object held in memory to some form of secondary storage is called passivation.
The transfer of the passivated state back into memory is called activation.

CDI-Spec 1.2 – Chapter 6.6.1

CDI’s session and conversation scopes are the only build-in passivation capable scopes. Request and application scopes are not passivating capable. If a bean is defined with a passivating scope, it and all applied interceptors and decorators must be serializable (see CDI 1.2 Specification – 6.6.1. Passivation capable beans).

Passivation of Normal Scoped injections

When working with passivation capable scopes such as @SessionScoped, it is still possible to inject references to non-passivating scopes such as @ApplicationScoped. Application scoped beans are not passivation capable, however the injected dependencies are.

[java]
@SessionScoped
public class MySession implements Serializable {
@Inject
private MyAppData myAppData;

}

@ApplicationScoped
public class MyAppData {

}
[/java]
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