Question

I have a service that has several methods marked with @Transactional, including methods a, b and c. These 3 methods are nested in the following way a -> b -> c. Here is a code sample:

@Transactional
public void a() {
    while(condition) {
        try {
            b();
        } catch(MyException e) {
            logger.warn(e.getMessage());
        }
    }
}

Method b however is annotated like this:

@Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW, rollbackFor = {MyException.class})

However, when MyException is thrown from method c, the exception is caught at method a and when that exits, the transaction is comitted and that includes whatever has been done by call to b() that threw the exception and should have been rolled back(?).
I am using sql server 2012 express with spring 3.0.7 and my spring configuration is like this:

<tx:annotation-driven />
<bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager" id="transactionManager">
    <qualifier value="txm1"/>
    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory"/>
</bean>
<bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean" id="entityManagerFactory">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    <property name="persistenceXmlLocation" value="classpath:META-INF/jpa-persistence.xml"/>
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="Unit1" />
</bean>

Answer 1

Method b seems to be in the same class as method a. If you’re not using AspectJ, the @Transactional-annotations are handled by a JDK dynamic proxy, through which your calls from outside the class travel to method a. The call needs to travel through the proxy for the @Transactional-annotations to have effect, see for example here, under ‘Understanding AOP proxies’: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.0.M3/spring-framework-reference/html/ch08s06.html

The key thing to understand here is that the client code inside the
main(..) of the Main class has a reference to the proxy. This means
that method calls on that object reference will be calls on the proxy,
and as such the proxy will be able to delegate to all of the
interceptors (advice) that are relevant to that particular method
call. However, once the call has finally reached the target object,
the SimplePojo reference in this case, any method calls that it may
make on itself, such as this.bar() or this.foo(), are going to be
invoked against the this reference, and not the proxy. This has
important implications. It means that self-invocation is not going to
result in the advice associated with a method invocation getting a
chance to execute.