Spring @Transaction method call by the method within the same class, does not work?

Question

I am new to Spring Transaction. Some thing that I found really odd, probably I did understand this properly. I wanted to have a transactional around method level and I have a caller method within the same class and it seems like it does not like that, it has to be called from the separate class. I don't understand how is that possible. If anyone has an idea how to resolve this issue, I would greatly appreciate. I would like to use the same class to call the annotated transactional method.

Thanks in advance, Mike

Here is the code:

public class UserService {

    @Transactional
    public boolean addUser(String userName, String password) {
        try {
            // call DAO layer and adds to database.
        } catch (Throwable e) {
            TransactionAspectSupport.currentTransactionStatus()
                    .setRollbackOnly();

        }
    }

    public boolean addUsers(List<User> users) {
        for (User user : users) {
            addUser(user.getUserName, user.getPassword);
        }
    } 
}

Answer 1

first of all, you should label this java, spring!

putting an annotation on a method will force spring to intercept each call to the addUser method of your service class.

if you are making a call within the service, spring is not aware of it, so you have to put one around that too.

usually you put @Transactional annotations at the end of your transaction, which might be a webservice-method or something like that, so you can rollback each change during that call.

Answer 2

It's an limitation with Spring AOP. (dynamic objects and CGLIB)

If you configure Spring to use AspectJ to handle the transactions, your code will work.

The simple and probably best alternative is to refactor your code. For example one class that handles users and one that process each user. Then default transaction handling with Spring AOP will work.

Configuration tips for handling transactions with AspectJ

To enable Spring to use AspectJ for transactions, you must set the mode to AspectJ:

<tx:annotation-driven mode="aspectj"/>

If you're using Spring with an older version than 3.0, you must also add this to your Spring configuration:

<bean class="org.springframework.transaction.aspectj
        .AnnotationTransactionAspect" factory-method="aspectOf">
    <property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager" />
</bean>

Answer 3

The problem here is, that Spring's AOP proxies don't extend but rather wrap your service instance to intercept calls. This has the effect, that any call to "this" from within your service instance is directly invoked on that instance and cannot be intercepted by the wrapping proxy (the proxy is not even aware of any such call). One solutions is already mentioned. Another nifty one would be to simply have Spring inject an instance of the service into the service itself, and call your method on the injected instance, which will be the proxy that handles your transactions. But be aware, that this may have bad side effects too, if your service bean is not a singleton:

<bean id="userService" class="your.package.UserService">
  <property name="self" ref="userService" />
    ...
</bean>

public class UserService {
    private UserService self;

    public void setSelf(UserService self) {
        this.self = self;
    }

    @Transactional
    public boolean addUser(String userName, String password) {
        try {
        // call DAO layer and adds to database.
        } catch (Throwable e) {
            TransactionAspectSupport.currentTransactionStatus()
                .setRollbackOnly();

        }
    }

    public boolean addUsers(List<User> users) {
        for (User user : users) {
            self.addUser(user.getUserName, user.getPassword);
        }
    } 
}