Bubbling Up Nested-transaction Failures with ActiveRecord

Question

I have a method in a service object that composes operations that should be wrapped in a transaction. Some of these operations are also wrapped in transactions. For example:

class PostCreator    def create       ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do         post.do_this         post.do_that         user.do_more(post, other_stuff)       end    end  end   def Post    def do_this      transaction do; ...; end    end  end 

I need any nested failures to bubble up all the way to the top, but I'm not sure how to make that happen, and the ActiveRecord docs on nested transactions don't seem to offer a solution. From the docs:

# Standard nesting  User.transaction do   User.create(username: 'Kotori')   User.transaction do     User.create(username: 'Nemu')     raise ActiveRecord::Rollback    #  This won't bubble up:                                     #  _Both_ users will still be created.   end end  # Nesting with `requires_new: true` on the nested transaction  User.transaction do   User.create(username: 'Kotori')   User.transaction(requires_new: true) do     User.create(username: 'Nemu')     raise ActiveRecord::Rollback    #  This won't bubble up either                                     #  "Kotori" will still be created.   end end 

Answer 1

Here's how you could get failures in your nested transactions to bubble up:

User.transaction do   User.create(username: 'Kotori')   raise ActiveRecord::Rollback unless User.transaction(requires_new: true) do     User.create(username: 'Nemu')     raise ActiveRecord::Rollback   end end 

Basically, you have to raise an error in your top-level transaction for it to rollback too. To do that, you raise an error if the nested transaction returns a falsey value(nil) or a truthy value.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Another easier approach, you can raise an CustomError < StandardError. Unlike ActiveRecord::Rollback, Error will bubble up through parent transactions. You can handle it wherever required. All other inner transactions will be rolled back.

Try the below template.

ActiveRecord::Base.transacton do     ActiveRecord::Base.transacton do         raise StandardError.new     end end