Best practices for rolling back transactions in Spring 3/Hibernate

Question

Referencing Spring documentation:

Any RuntimeException will trigger rollback, and any checked Exception will not

Referencing javapractices.com

Unchecked exceptions :

• represent defects in the program (bugs) - often invalid arguments passed to a non-private method. To quote from The Java Programming Language, by Gosling, Arnold, and Holmes : "Unchecked runtime exceptions represent conditions that, generally speaking, reflect errors in your program's logic and cannot be reasonably recovered from at run time."
• are subclasses of RuntimeException, and are usually implemented using IllegalArgumentException, NullPointerException, or IllegalStateException
• a method is not obliged to establish a policy for the unchecked exceptions thrown by its implementation (and they almost always do not do so)

Checked exceptions :

• represent invalid conditions in areas outside the immediate control of the program (invalid user input, database problems, network outages, absent files)
• are subclasses of Exception
• a method is obliged to establish a policy for all checked exceptions thrown by its implementation (either pass the checked exception further up the stack, or handle it somehow)

If during my business logic I discover a problem and I want to rollback the changes, I have to throw a new RuntimeException? It's not really a RuntimeException (unchecked exception) since I've identified it in the logic. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding these concepts?

My real question, what's best practices for rolling back a transaction in my @Transactional service methods?

Answer 1

If you're using checked exceptions you simply add them to the rollbackFor property of your @Transactional annotation.

@Transactional(rollbackFor = { MyInvalidUserException.class, MyApplicationException.class })
public void method() throws MyInvalidUserException,  MyApplicationException { 
    ... 
    ... 
}

etc.

org.life.java's answer also works fine. It's an academic decision if you want to intermix programmatic transaction management into your declarative transactions or keep it strictly declarative.