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Zhenyang Hua

This is a space that holds a collection of my personal work and ideas

Spring @Transactional - Propagation Type

Posted on 05/08/2018

Spring @Transactional annotation is concise and powerful. To understand what's the best property setting for your use case in this annotation could be confusing if you don't clearly understand what transaction management key concepts are. In this series, we will talk about the key concepts in transaction management that could be configured through the @Transactional annotation. This article focuses on the propagation type.

What is Propagation

Propagation describes the transactional behavior from the client when a transactional method is called. In Spring-managed transactions, there are two types of transactions -- physical and logical transactions. The physical transaction is always the outer transaction while the logical transaction is the inner transaction that is mapped to the physical transaction based on the propagation type as the transaction propagates.

Propagation Types

There are seven types of propagation that we could use for the propagation property, among which only REQUIRED, REQUIRED_NEW, and NESTED types guarantee a transaction will be started, so the isolation level property will be ignored if the propagation type is not one of these three types.

Type Definition
REQUIRED Use the current transaction, create a new transaction and use it if no transaction exists.
REQUIRED_NEW Always create a new transaction, and suspend the current transaction if it exists.
NESTED Execute the transaction within a current transaction if a current transaction exists, otherwise create a new transaction and use it.
SUPPORTS Use the current transaction if it exists, otherwise execute the transaction non-transactionally.
NOT_SUPPORTED Execute the transaction non-transactionally, suspend the current transaction if it exists.
MANDATORY Use the current transaction, throw an exception if no transaction exists.
NEVER Execute the transaction non-transactionally, throw an exception if a transaction exists.

The Syntax

@Transactional (propagation = Propagation.SUPPORTS)
public void someServiceFacade() {
    // calling the repository layer.
}

If the propagation property is not specified, the default will be REQUIRED.

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