I am using JPA and have the problem that some of my @Entity annotated classes are in jar files imported by my application and are therefore not automatically discovered and mapped when the application server (tomcat) loads the application.

What is the best way to load these classes? Do i need to add them to persistence.xml or is there any other way that they can be automatically discovered within the jar without using xml configurations.

Thanks

The solution (pretty obvious really) was to create persistence.xml within META-INF in the jar containing the entities.