spring @Transactional annotation

Question

I have an abstract class and two sub classes that extend it. I have the following in spring config file

<bean id="importConfigFile" class="xxx.ImportConfigFiles" parent="parentImportFile"></bean>

<bean id="importFile" class="xxx.ImportUMTSKPIFiles" parent="parentImportFile"></bean>

<bean id="parentImportFile" name="parentImportFile" class="xxx.ImportUMTSFiles" abstract="true"></bean>

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

In my abstract class I have the following methods

public void importDataToDB(){
    //all the good stuff goes in here
}

@Transactional
public void executeInsertUpdateQuery(){
    //all the good stuff goes in here
}

My java code

ImportConfigFiles importConfigFiles = (ImportConfigFiles)context.getBean("importConfigFile");
importConfigFiles.setFileLocation(destPath);
importConfigFiles.importDataToDB();

This does not work. executeInsertUpdateQuery() executes just one native sql query. If I put @Transactional on imortDataToDB() it works but then it makes my transaction huge since inside that method I loop through all the rows in a file and insert the records in db.

Answer 1

This is one of the major pitfalls in Spring - if you call @Transactional-method from non-transactional method in the same class, the @Transactional is ignored (unless you use AspectJ weaving). This is not Spring problem per se - the EJB has the same shortcomings.

Unfortunately with interface-based and class-based proxies all you can do is to split your class in two:

public class BeanA() {

    @Resource
    private BeanB b;

    public void importDataToDB(){
        b.executeInsertUpdateQuery();
    }
}

public class BeanB {

    @Transactional
    public void executeInsertUpdateQuery(){
        //all the good stuff goes in here
    }

}

The whole hustle is caused by the internal implementation of AOP proxies in Spring. With the code above new transaction will be started every time you call b.executeInsertUpdateQuery() from non-transactional BeanA.

^{I wrote about it on my blog Spring pitfalls: proxying, Spring AOP riddle and Spring AOP riddle demystified.}