[SOLVED] Spring Retry with Transactional

Spring Retry with Transactional

Is Spring Retry guaranteed to work with Spring's @Transactional annotation?

Specifically, I'm trying to use @Retryable for optimistic locking. It seems like it would be dependent on the ordering of the AOP proxies that were created. For example, if the calls look like this:

Calling code -> Retry Proxy -> Transaction Proxy -> Actual DB Code

Then it would work correctly, but if the proxies were structured like this:

Calling code -> Transaction Proxy -> Retry Proxy -> Actual DB Code

Then the retry wouldn't work, because the act of closing the transaction is what throws the optmistic locking exception.

In testing, it appeared to generate the first case (retry, then transaction), but I couldn't tell if this was a guaranteed behavior or just lucky.

Solution

Found the answer here: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/4.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/transaction.html#tx-decl-explained Table 2 indicates that the advice for the Transactional annotation has an order of Ordered.LOWEST_PRECEDENCE, which means that it is safe to combine Retryable with Transactional as long as you aren't overriding the order of the advice for either of those annotations. In other words, you can safely use this form:

@Retryable(StaleStateException.class)
@Transactional
public void performDatabaseActions() {
    //Database updates here that may cause an optimistic locking failure 
    //when the transaction closes
}