Spring - how to gather informations during rollbacks in declarative transaction management

Question

Hi,

Could please anybody tell me If it is safe and recommended to catch SQL and other exceptions within @Transactional methods ? When programmatic transaction management is used, I can simply catch the exception and do whatever I want, but I don't know if I don't break the transactional AOP system by catching these exceptions that would otherwise trigger the rollback ... if I do it declarative way.

I suppose there are proxies, that create a logical transaction with separate connection for @Transactional methods in the AOP advices. And they need to catch the exception that "I want to catch" and roll the transaction back.

Answer 1

What you described is indeed how Spring knows whether or not to initiate a transaction rollback. If you swallow the exception then Spring never has a chance to know that it should rollback the transaction.

Answer 2

You can mark the transaction programmatically as rollback-only using this code

TransactionAspectSupport.currentTransactionStatus().setRollbackOnly();

See Rolling back a declarative transaction in the Spring Reference.

But it's not recommended, because you are coupling your code tightly to the spring framework.

---

Perhaps, if you do that in more than one place, you should introduce a Helper Method, something like TransactionUtils.rollbackCurrentTransaction(). That way, if you decide to change your transactional approach (or god forbid, move away from spring), you only have to change one method.