Spring @Transactional does not work in JUnit test?

Question

I am using Spring 3.2, Hibernate and JUnit 4.

My Dao class is as follows:

@Transactional public class SomeDaoImpl implements SomeDao {

The update operations on this work if executed directly from web application. However, I am seeing that junit integration tests that exercise the update methods do not actually persist the changes. Is something rolling the transactions back when junit methods are executed?

Answer 1

By reference, transactions are not persisted in test contexts in Spring. As mentioned, although unusual, if you still need to do so you can use @TransactionConfiguration and @Rollback to change the default behavior.

Answer 2

DAOs should not be transactional. How can a DAO know if it should participate in a larger transaction?

Services ought to own transactions in the typical Spring layered architecture.

It's typical to run your unit tests for databases in such a way that they do roll back. You don't want your tests to alter the database, unless you've set up a test database that you can drop and recreate at will.

The question ought to be: How do your tests, as written, commit the transaction? If you never commit, you'll never see the records.