Question

I’m mixing spring-data and CXF to create a RESTful endpoint that creates neo4j nodes. My structure is a set Interfaces which define the public facing methods, and my implementations which have several private methods under that are called by my public methods.

My private methods have spring-tx’s @Transactional on them, and when I try to call these from my public methods, I get a org.neo4j.graphdb.NotInTransactionException. Below is a GitHub project that is setup to show my configuration and you can also run it to see what’s wrong:

https://github.com/NicholasAStuart/broken-spring-neo4j-cxf.git

Can anyone help me? I’ve followed the steps from the documentation on spring-data-neo4j, but I cannot seem to get this working, can anyone help me?

Answer 1

The @Transactional annotation does not work on private methods.

From the Spring documentation:

When using proxies, you should apply the @Transactional annotation
only to methods with public visibility. If you do annotate protected,
private or package-visible methods with the @Transactional annotation,
no error is raised, but the annotated method does not exhibit the
configured transactional settings. Consider the use of AspectJ (see
below) if you need to annotate non-public methods.

You may be able to use the aspectj mode to enable this behavior on any type of method.