Spring @Transactional in an Aspect (AOP)

Question

I've created an Aspect which contains an @Transactional annotation. My advice is being invoked as expected, but the new entity AuditRecord is never saved to the database, it looks like my @Transactional annotation is not working.

@Aspect
@Order(100)
public class ServiceAuditTrail {

private AppService appService; 
private FooRecordRepository fooRecordRepository;

@AfterReturning("execution(* *.app.services.*.*(..))")
public void logAuditTrail(JoinPoint jp){
    Object[] signatureArgs = jp.getArgs();
    String methodName = jp.getSignature().getName();

    List<String> args = new ArrayList<String>();
    for(Object arg : signatureArgs){
        args.add(arg.toString());
    }

    createRecord(methodName, args);
}

@Transactional
private void createRecord(String methodName, List<String> args){
    AuditRecord auditRecord = new AuditRecord();
    auditRecord.setDate(new Date());
    auditRecord.setAction(methodName);
    auditRecord.setDetails(StringUtils.join(args, ";"));
    auditRecord.setUser(appService.getUser());
    fooRecordRepository.addAuditRecord(auditRecord);
}

    public void setAppService(AppService appService) {
        this.appService = appService;
    }

    public void setFooRecordRepository(FooRecordRepository fooRecordRepository) {
        this.fooRecordRepository= fooRecordRepository;
    }

}

The bean context is as follows:

<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="txManager.main" order="200"/>

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy />

<bean id="app.aspect.auditTrail" class="kernel.audit.ServiceAuditTrail">
    <property name="appService" ref="app.service.generic" />
    <property name="fooRecordRepository" ref="domain.repository.auditRecord" />
</bean>

My pointcut is intercepting only interfaces (service interfaces). The service methods may or may not be transactional. If the service method is transactional, I would like that transaction to be rolled back if the Advice fails for some reason.

My question: Why is the transactional annotation being ignored? This is my first time building an AOP service with Spring, I would also welcome any architectural or implementation improvements.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In Spring, @Transactional works by creating a proxy of your class (either a Java or cglib proxy) and intercepting the annotated method. This means that @Transactional doesn't work if you are calling the annotated method from another method of the same class.

Just move the createRecord method to a new class (don't forget to make it a Spring bean too) and it will work.