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My Spring/Java web application has @Transactional services that can touch the database:
@Transactional
public class AbstractDBService { ... }
Desired functionality is for any uncaught throwable that propagates up beyond the service layer to cause a rollback. Was a bit surprised this isn't the default behaviour but after a bit of googling tried:
@Transactional(rollbackFor = Exception.class)
This seems to work except when an exception is deliberately swallowed and not rethrown. (The particular case is when an entity is not found. Guess this could be redesigned to not throw an Exception but expect there will inevitably be others - e.g. one that springs to mind is an InterruptedException when using Thread.sleep()). Then Spring complains:
org.springframework.transaction.TransactionSystemException: Could not commit JPA transaction; nested exception is javax.persistence.RollbackException: Transaction marked as rollbackOnly ...truncated.. Caused by: javax.persistence.RollbackException: Transaction marked as rollbackOnly at org.hibernate.jpa.internal.TransactionImpl.commit(TransactionImpl.java:58) at org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager.doCommit(JpaTransactionManager.java:517)
Am I missing something here?... Is there a way to tell Spring to rollback on all uncaught throwables?
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Checked exceptions that are thrown from a transactional method do not result in rollback in the default configuration.
The @Transactional annotation makes use of the attributes rollbackFor or rollbackForClassName to rollback the transactions, and the attributes noRollbackFor or noRollbackForClassName to avoid rollback on listed exceptions. The default rollback behavior in the declarative approach will rollback on runtime exceptions.
@Transactional only rolls back transactions for unchecked exceptions. For checked exceptions and their subclasses, it commits data. So although an exception is raised here, because it's a checked exception, Spring ignores it and commits the data to the database, making the system inconsistent.
Note however that the Spring Framework's transaction infrastructure code will, by default, only mark a transaction for rollback in the case of runtime, unchecked exceptions; that is, when the thrown exception is an instance or subclass of RuntimeException. (Errors will also - by default - result in a rollback.)
If you want to rollback on all uncaught Throwables, you can specify that in the annotation:
@Transactional(rollbackFor = Throwable.class)
By default Spring doesn't rollback for Error subclasses, probably because it seems doubtful once an Error is thrown that the JVM will be in a good enough state to do anything about it anyway, at that point the transaction can just time out. (If you try to rollback when an OutOfMemoryError is raised, the most likely outcome is another OutOfMemoryError.) So you may not gain much with this.
When you mention the case of swallowing an exception, there's no way Spring can be expected to know about it because the exception is not finding its way to Spring's proxy (which is implementing the transactional functionality). This is what happens in your RollbackException example, Hibernate has figured out the transaction needs to rollback but Spring didn't get the memo because somebody ate the exception. So Spring isn't rolling the transaction back, it thinks everything is ok and tries to commit, but the commit fails due to Hibernate having marked the transaction rollback-only.
The answer is to not swallow those exceptions but let them be thrown; making them unchecked is supposed to make it easier for you to do the right thing. There should be an exception handler set up to receive exceptions thrown from the controllers, most exceptions thrown at any level of the application can be caught there and logged.
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