Question

I need to do a considerably long JDBC transaction. Can I distribute the statements required for the transaction in multiple methods, like this?

try {
    // ... Get connection
    // Start transaction
    connection.setAutoCommit(false);
    // In every one of these methods a series of statements is executed
    // All methods throw a SQLException which is caught here for rollback
    // Every method takes this connection as an argument
    method1(connection);
    method2(connection);
    // ...
    methodN(connection);
    // Commit all changes done inside the methods
    connection.commit();
} catch (SQLException e) {
    connection.rollback();
} finally {
    connection.setAutoCommit(true);
    connection.close();
}

Answer 1

I don’t see any problem with this. The important thing is to make sure you close the connection when you are done, which are you doing there. I would make sure that the code that opens the connection is in the same method where it closes it, because connection leaks can be really tough to track down.

As a side note, I like to use Spring’s JDBC functionality. It manages connections for you and is really easy to use.
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/jdbc.html