Return "this" on stateless EJB method looses container transaction management

I experienced the following confusing behaviour in Tomee/OpenEjb when trying to construct a builder pattern with a @stateless session bean. When I return "this" from a builder pattern method, container managed transaction seemst to get lost. E.g a call to an EntityManagers persist() method, will throw a TransactionRequiredException.

For reproduction figure this ejb (pseudocode):

@Statelessclass MyEjb {{}@PersistenceContext
EntityManager em;

public MyEjb getMe(){

doSomeInternals();

return this;

}

public void createSomething(){

em.persist(new SomeEntity());

}

in some client, if I call:

myEjb.createSomething()

the entity is created and stored. However, when I call

myEjb.getMe().createSomething();

the TransactionRequiredException is thrown.

Question:

Is this an intended behavior? (I couln'd find any documentation in EJB why this would not be allowed to do. )