Spring @Transactional in an Aspect (AOP)

Question

I've created an Aspect which contains an @Transactional annotation. My advice is being invoked as expected, but the new entity AuditRecord is never saved to the database, it looks like my @Transactional annotation is not working.

@Aspect
@Order(100)
public class ServiceAuditTrail {

private AppService appService; 
private FooRecordRepository fooRecordRepository;

@AfterReturning("execution(* *.app.services.*.*(..))")
public void logAuditTrail(JoinPoint jp){
    Object[] signatureArgs = jp.getArgs();
    String methodName = jp.getSignature().getName();

    List<String> args = new ArrayList<String>();
    for(Object arg : signatureArgs){
        args.add(arg.toString());
    }

    createRecord(methodName, args);
}

@Transactional
private void createRecord(String methodName, List<String> args){
    AuditRecord auditRecord = new AuditRecord();
    auditRecord.setDate(new Date());
    auditRecord.setAction(methodName);
    auditRecord.setDetails(StringUtils.join(args, ";"));
    auditRecord.setUser(appService.getUser());
    fooRecordRepository.addAuditRecord(auditRecord);
}

    public void setAppService(AppService appService) {
        this.appService = appService;
    }

    public void setFooRecordRepository(FooRecordRepository fooRecordRepository) {
        this.fooRecordRepository= fooRecordRepository;
    }

}

The bean context is as follows:

<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="txManager.main" order="200"/>

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy />

<bean id="app.aspect.auditTrail" class="kernel.audit.ServiceAuditTrail">
    <property name="appService" ref="app.service.generic" />
    <property name="fooRecordRepository" ref="domain.repository.auditRecord" />
</bean>

My pointcut is intercepting only interfaces (service interfaces). The service methods may or may not be transactional. If the service method is transactional, I would like that transaction to be rolled back if the Advice fails for some reason.

My question: Why is the transactional annotation being ignored? This is my first time building an AOP service with Spring, I would also welcome any architectural or implementation improvements.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In Spring, @Transactional works by creating a proxy of your class (either a Java or cglib proxy) and intercepting the annotated method. This means that @Transactional doesn't work if you are calling the annotated method from another method of the same class.

Just move the createRecord method to a new class (don't forget to make it a Spring bean too) and it will work.

Answer 2

A very good question. If you have to rollback/commit the transactions you can directly configure the spring transactional as mentioned here.

Doing this method does not require you to add @Transactional on each of the class/method manually.

Spring configuration is below(copied from the reference link ). Instead of writing custom advisors/pointcuts just add configuration in spring-application context.xml file with your advisors/pointcuts.

<bean id="fooService" class="x.y.service.DefaultFooService"/>

    <!-- the transactional advice (what 'happens'; see the <aop:advisor/> bean below) -->
    <tx:advice id="txAdvice" transaction-manager="txManager">
        <!-- the transactional semantics... -->
        <tx:attributes>
            <!-- all methods starting with 'get' are read-only -->
            <tx:method name="get*" read-only="true"/>
            <!-- other methods use the default transaction settings (see below) -->
            <tx:method name="*"/>
        </tx:attributes>
    </tx:advice>

    <!-- ensure that the above transactional advice runs for any execution
        of an operation defined by the FooService interface -->
    <aop:config>
        <aop:pointcut id="fooServiceOperation" expression="execution(* x.y.service.FooService.*(..))"/>
        <aop:advisor advice-ref="txAdvice" pointcut-ref="fooServiceOperation"/>
    </aop:config>

    <!-- don't forget the DataSource -->
    <bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver"/>
        <property name="url" value="jdbc:oracle:thin:@rj-t42:1521:elvis"/>
        <property name="username" value="scott"/>
        <property name="password" value="tiger"/>
    </bean>

    <!-- similarly, don't forget the PlatformTransactionManager -->
    <bean id="txManager" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
    </bean>

ref:

1. Spring transactional : http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/transaction.html