Question

I have a Spring MVC controller and when an exception occurs I would like to show the exception message in the view and rollback the open transactions. The view contains a form like this:

<form:form method="POST" modelAttribute="registrationForm">
    <form:errors path="*" cssClass="error-message"/>
    ...
</form:form>

I would like to show the exception message in the view, using the <form:errors ... /> feature. This is my current quite horrible solution:

@RequestMapping(value = "/registration", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView submitForm(@ModelAttribute("registrationForm") RegistrationForm registrationForm,
                         BindingResult result,
                         ModelAndView modelAndView,
                         HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception
{
    registrationValidator.validate(registrationForm, result);

    if(result.hasErrors())
    {
        return setupForm(modelAndView, registrationForm);
    }
    else
    {
        try
        {
            // ... Some non-transactional operations...

            // The following operation is the only one annotated with @Transactional
            // myExampleDao is @Autowired, can throw exception
            myExampleDao.createFoo(bar);

            // ... Other non-transactional operations...

            return new ModelAndView("redirect:successful");
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            throw new RegistrationException(e, registrationForm, result);
        }
    }
}

@ExceptionHandler(value = RegistrationException.class)
public ModelAndView registrationExceptionHandler(RegistrationException e) throws Exception
{
    RegistrationForm registrationForm = e.getRegistrationForm();
    BindingResult result = e.getBindingResult();

    result.reject("exception", e.getMessage());
    Map<String, Object> model = result.getModel();
    return setupForm(new ModelAndView("registration", model), registrationForm);
}

private ModelAndView setupForm(ModelAndView modelAndView, RegistrationForm registrationForm) throws Exception
{
    Map<String,Object> model = modelAndView.getModel();
    model.put("currentYear", Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.YEAR));
    return new ModelAndView("registration", model);
}

The problem I’m facing is that when the exception is thrown, the transaction is not rolled back.

Can anyone help?

Thank you.

Update: slightly changed the question for better understanding

Update: found a quite horrible solution to display the exception message in the view. Still facing the problem with the transaction that is not rolled back when the exception is thrown.

Update: I changed @Transactional to @Transactional(rollbackFor = Exception.class) in the MyExampleDao.createFoo(...) method and now everything is working perfectly. This solution is still ugly IMO, does anyone have a better solution?

Answer 1

No one suggested a better solution than my ugly one. Here is my solution that solved the problem I had:

@RequestMapping(value = "/registration", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView submitForm(@ModelAttribute("registrationForm") RegistrationForm registrationForm,
                         BindingResult result,
                         ModelAndView modelAndView,
                         HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception
{
    registrationValidator.validate(registrationForm, result);

    if(result.hasErrors())
    {
        return setupForm(modelAndView, registrationForm);
    }
    else
    {
        try
        {
            // ... Some non-transactional operations...

            // The following operation is the only one annotated with @Transactional
            // myExampleDao is @Autowired, can throw exception
            myExampleDao.createFoo(bar);

            // ... Other non-transactional operations...

            return new ModelAndView("redirect:successful");
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            throw new RegistrationException(e, registrationForm, result);
        }
    }
}

@ExceptionHandler(value = RegistrationException.class)
public ModelAndView registrationExceptionHandler(RegistrationException e) throws Exception
{
    RegistrationForm registrationForm = e.getRegistrationForm();
    BindingResult result = e.getBindingResult();

    result.reject("exception", e.getMessage());
    Map<String, Object> model = result.getModel();
    return setupForm(new ModelAndView("registration", model), registrationForm);
}

private ModelAndView setupForm(ModelAndView modelAndView, RegistrationForm registrationForm) throws Exception
{
    Map<String,Object> model = modelAndView.getModel();
    model.put("currentYear", Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.YEAR));
    return new ModelAndView("registration", model);
}