No rollback only for transaction when exception occurs in submethod

Question

I'm using Hibernate + spring + @Transactional annotations to handle transactions in my application.

Transaction manager is declared as follows:

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager">
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
</bean>

<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager"/>

This works well in most cases, but I've found a problem where I have 2 methods, both annotated @Transactional:

package temp;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional;

public class OuterTestService {
    @Autowired
    private InnerTestService innerTestService;

    @Transactional
    public void outerMethod() {
        try {
            innerTestService.innerTestMethod();
        } catch (RuntimeException e) {
            // some code here
        }
    }
}

and

package temp;

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional;

public class InnerTestService {

    @Transactional
    public void innerTestMethod() throws RuntimeException {
        throw new RuntimeException();
    }
}

When I invoke OuterTestService#outerMethod(), I get an exception

org.springframework.transaction.UnexpectedRollbackException: Transaction rolled back because it has been marked as rollback-only

As there is only one transaction (no nested transactions), the whole outerTestMethod()'s transaction is marked as rollback-only.

I've found that I can easily overcome this using noRollbackFor:

package cz.csas.pdb.be.service.tempdelete;

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional;

public class InnerTestService {

    @Transactional(noRollbackFor = RuntimeException.class)
    public void innerTestMethod() throws RuntimeException {
        throw new RuntimeException();
    }
}

But this has to be explicitly used on every method. Because this error is not raised during tests (which are rollbacked), this is not acceptable.

My question -- is there a way to automatically (eg. not explicitly for every method) set that transactions are rolled back only when an exception is raised from method which started the transaction (in this case, the outerTestMethod())?

Answer 1

Create another annotation, e.g. @NoRollbackTransactional, something like:

@Transactional(noRollbackFor = RuntimeException.class)
public @interface NoRollbackTransactional {
}

And use this on your methods. On the other hand I agree with Donal's comment, you should revise your transaction scopes, imho it is generally not a good idea to call @Transactional from another @Transactional.