Spring transaction: rollback on Exception or Throwable

Question

I wonder whether it makes sense to use instead of

@Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRED, rollbackFor = Exception.class)

to use

Answer 1

Since you are using @Transactional, we can safely assume you are doing your database operations through Spring, Hibernate, or other JDBC wrappers. These JDBC wrappers don't typically throw checked exceptions, they throw runtime exceptions that wrap the JDBC SQLException types.

@Transactional is setup to rollback, by default, only when an unchecked exception is thrown.

Consider a use case like so

@Transactional
public void persistAndWrite(Bean someBean) throws IOException {
    // DB operation
    getSession().save(someBean); 

    // File IO operation which throws IOException
    someFileService.writeToFile(someBean); 
}

You wouldn't necessarily want to rollback the DB operation just because we couldn't write something to a file.

Similarly

@Transactional
public void persistAndThrowOutOfMemory(Bean someBean)  {
    // DB operation
    getSession().save(someBean);

    // consumes all memory, throws OutOfMemoryError
    someService.hugeOperationThrowsOutOfMemoryError(); 
}

You wouldn't necessarily want to rollback the saved entity just because some service cause too much memory to be consumed.

@Transactional gives you the option. Use it where appropriate.