Question

The short question: how can I (or is it possible to) make use of Spring’s transaction manager in classes which are not declared as beans in Spring?

The details…
I have an application using Spring 3 and Hibernate 3.6, and two classes like this:

public class FooManagerImpl implements FooManager {

    @Override
    @Transactional
    public Foo getFoo(int id) {
        Session s = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        // do some query
        return foo;
    }
}

FooManagerImpl is a Spring bean (see below), but FooImpl is not. FooImpl has a parent/child relationship with a third class, Bar, which is also an Entity (this is where things break).

@Entity
@Table(name = "foo_table")
public class FooImpl implements Foo {

    private List<Bar> bars;

    @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, fetch = FetchType.EAGER)
    @Fetch(value = FetchMode.SELECT)
    @JoinColumn(name = "foo_id", referencedColumnName = "foo_id")
    public List<Bar> getBar() {
        return this.bars; // Bar is also an entity
    }

    public void addBar(Bar b) {
       this.bar.add(b);
   }
}

And the relevant portions from the Spring configuration:

<tx:annotation-driven />
<jee:jndi-lookup id="fooDatasource" jndi-name="fooDatasource" />
<bean id="fooSessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
    <property name="dataSource" ref="fooDatasource" />
        <property name="hibernateProperties">
        <props>
            <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect</prop>
        </props>
    </property>
    <property name="packagesToScan">
        <value>com.foo</value>
    </property>
</bean>
<bean id="fooTransactionManager"
    class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager">
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="fooSessionFactory" />
    <qualifier value="ec" />
</bean>
<bean id="fooManager" class="com.foo.model.FooManagerImpl">
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="fooSessionFactory" />
</bean>

Now as I understand it, when calling FooImpl.addBar(Bar), Hibernate will try to persist the changes, which fails because there’s no transaction bound. There’s no TX bound because Spring isn’t proxying for any of the methods in FooImpl because it’s not a bean. Is that a correct assessment? Is there a way I can make this work?

Solutions I’ve found so far, but that don’t seem to quite work (or I can’t get them to work):

• Setup an AOP proxy to insert transactional advice, like here. But as far as I can tell, those proxies will only apply if I’ve defined the class as a bean, right?

• I think I can also use AspectJ, such as <tx:annotation-driven mode="aspectj"/>, but that seems to require I use a different classloader, which for various reasons, I can’t do (requires a change to Tomcat, rather than just my webapp… I think). See here.

• I don’t really want to use OpenSessionInView because I don’t really like the idea of backend transactions occurring outside of the service layer.

So, I’m stumped. Does anyone have any ideas? Should one of the things I’ve tried already have worked? (Possible I screwed it up.)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not need to declare the entity (FooImpl) as a spring bean. you need this

<bean id="fooSessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="dataSource" ref="fooDatasource" />
    <property name="annotatedClasses">
        <list>
           <value>com.foo.model.FooImpl</value>     // Entity
        </list>
    </property>
    <property name="hibernateProperties">
    <props>
        <prop key="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect</prop>
    </props>
</property>
<property name="packagesToScan">
    <value>com.foo</value>
</property>

view this example