Ankur Mhatre
585eed4d57
The repository now aggregates two independent modules. migration-behavior/ is the
original project, moved unchanged; it stays on Spring Boot 4.0.6 / JDK 21 because
that is what the four published migration articles were verified against, and
upgrading it would silently invalidate output they quote. The article-tagged trees
are untouched, so links into a tag are unaffected.
transactions/ Companion code for "@Transactional in Spring: Propagation, Isolation,
and the Six Ways It Silently Does Nothing". Spring Boot 4.1.1 / JDK 25.
Every row of the propagation matrix is produced by calling the method and asking the
transaction manager what it did. The transaction NAME is the exhibit: a scope that
joined reports its caller's name, a scope that started its own reports its own.
Three things the transcripts settle:
- Propagation.NESTED cannot be used with JpaTransactionManager. It fails twice,
with two different messages, the second of which blames your JPA provider. The
savepoint manager comes from the object the JpaDialect returns when it begins the
transaction, and Hibernate's does not implement one. It works on
DataSourceTransactionManager, because a savepoint is a JDBC concept -- shown
working there rather than only failing here.
- Catching a REQUIRED inner failure does not save the transaction. The inner scope
has already marked it rollback-only, so the commit throws
UnexpectedRollbackException from a place with no connection to the cause.
- A checked exception commits, and so does a swallowed one. Those two do not merely
fail to start a transaction; they commit work the code was abandoning.
19 contract tests, six captured transcripts, all regenerated by scripts/run-all.sh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Gip4srpzMwjgoba6uEfbr5
@Transactional: propagation, isolation, and the six silent failures
Companion project for @Transactional in Spring on ankurm.com.
Every row of the propagation matrix was produced by calling the method and asking the transaction manager what it did — not by reading the enum.
Versions
| Spring Boot | 4.1.1 |
| Spring Framework | 7.0.9 |
| JDK | Eclipse Temurin 25.0.4.1 (LTS) |
| Database | H2 in-memory |
| Transaction manager | JpaTransactionManager (Spring Boot's default for JPA) |
Quickstart
export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk-25
mvn -DskipTests package
./scripts/run-all.sh # regenerate every transcript in docs/output/
mvn test # 19 contract tests
The application listens on 8081 so it can run alongside the other demos.
Endpoints
| Endpoint | Purpose |
|---|---|
GET /tx/propagation |
all seven propagations, called with and without a caller's transaction |
GET /tx/rollback |
does the inner write survive the caller's rollback? |
GET /tx/silent |
the six failures, plus a control that works |
GET /tx/nested-jdbc |
NESTED succeeding, on a JDBC transaction manager |
GET /tx/isolation |
isolation and readOnly where they apply and where they are ignored |
Options
| Property | Effect |
|---|---|
--demo.nested-allowed=true |
replaces the transaction manager with one that has nestedTransactionAllowed=true, to show the second failure |
Documentation
- What
@Transactionalactually does - The seven propagation values
- Rollback, and the exception that appears from nowhere
NESTED, and why it does not work with JPA- Six ways
@Transactionalsilently does nothing - Isolation, read-only, and settings that are ignored
Captured output
| File | Produced by |
|---|---|
00-versions.txt |
scripts/demo-versions.sh |
01-propagation.txt |
scripts/demo-propagation.sh |
02-rollback.txt |
scripts/demo-rollback.sh |
03-nested.txt |
scripts/demo-nested.sh |
04-silent-failures.txt |
scripts/demo-silent.sh |
05-isolation.txt |
scripts/demo-isolation.sh |
Three things the transcripts settle
Propagation.NESTEDcannot be used withJpaTransactionManager. It fails twice, with two different messages, the second of which blames your JPA provider. It works onDataSourceTransactionManager, because a savepoint is a JDBC concept.- Catching a
REQUIREDinner failure does not save the transaction. The inner scope already marked it rollback-only, so the commit throwsUnexpectedRollbackExceptionfrom a place with no connection to the original cause. - A checked exception commits. So does a swallowed one. These two do not merely fail to start a transaction — they commit work the code was trying to abandon.