Check if transaction in hibernate successful

Question

I am developing an application using hibernate and I save Entities as usual inside hibernate transactions. I want to 'get Feedback' from a transaction if it has completed sucessfully or not and according to that to excecute next code. Here is the trivial method I use to update the entity:

public boolean updateDepartment(Department s) {
        Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession();
        Transaction tx = HibernateUtil.getTransaction(session);
        boolean success = false;
        try 
        {
            tx.begin();
            session.update(s);
            tx.commit();
            success = true;
        } 
        catch (Exception e) 
        {
            tx.rollback();
            e.printStackTrace();
            success = false;
        }

        return success;
    }

Invocation of the method from other code:

boolean b = dao.updateDepartment(d);
if(b)
{
 doStuff();
}
else
{
 showMessage("Save not usccessful. Try again");
}

My question is whether this approach with the boolean variable is the optimal way, or could it be carried out in a better way. If my approach is OK, would it be better if the return statement would be surrounded with finally?

Answer 1

session.getTransaction().wasCommitted(); does return false even if the transaction was committed. Please take a look at

wasCommitted returns false

what worked for me is

// close database connection  
public boolean closeDBConnection() {  
    boolean successful = false;  
    try {  
        session.getTransaction().commit();  
        successful = true;  
    } catch (HibernateException r) {  
    //log exception here  
    } finally {  
        session.close();  
        session = null;  
    }  
    return successful;  
}