Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Spring Nested Transactions and problems with "Session is closed" Exceptions

I was really pulling my hair out over some code that did programmatic transaction handling using Spring's PlatformTransactionManager on top of Hibernate. It is fairly complicated, with up to 4 different transactions running concurrently. At one point it needs to process 3 different result sets, like this:

TransactionStatus status1 = transactionManager.getTransaction(new DefaultTransactionDefinition(TransactionDefinition.PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW));
PreparedStatement statement1 = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().connection().prepareStatement(...);

TransactionStatus status2 = transactionManager.getTransaction(new DefaultTransactionDefinition(TransactionDefinition.PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW));
PreparedStatement statement2 = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().connection().prepareStatement(...);


TransactionStatus status3 = transactionManager.getTransaction(new DefaultTransactionDefinition(TransactionDefinition.PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW));
PreparedStatement statement3 = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().connection().prepareStatement(...);

... // set parameters on the statements

ResultSet rs1 = statement1.executeQuery();
ResultSet rs2 = statement1.executeQuery();
ResultSet rs3 = statement1.executeQuery();

... // process the result sets

... // close the result sets and statements

transactionManager.commit(status1);
transactionManager.commit(status2);
transactionManager.commit(status3);


This part of the code ran fine the first time, but the next time, it would throw an exception saying "Session is closed", when trying to get the first transaction. Do you see the problem? I didn't see it for way too long. I spent time removing sections of code, staring at logs, and pulling lots of hair out, before I finally noticed that in the spring logging, after finishing that section of code, it was falling back to trying to use the wrong session.

Finally it dawned on me that Spring must be using a stack to keep track of the current session. When a transaction is started with PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW, the current session is pushed on the stack, and a new session is created and becomes the current session. When that transaction finishes, the current session is closed, and the previous session is popped off of the stack to resume as the now current session.

Looking at the documentation about transaction propagation, it does talk about "inner" and "outer" transactions, but I don't think it's quite explicit enough at explaining the nesting relationship. And my problem is that I wasn't really considering them to be nested, thinking of them more as simply independent transactions (in my defense, the docs do say that they are "completely independent" transactions). That is why it took me so long to realize my mistake.

My problem was that I was creating transaction 1, then transaction 2, then 3. But I was trying to commit transaction 1 first, then 2, then 3. Doing this messed up the stack, and in the end Spring was left with a session that had been closed as the current session. So the next attempt to use the session would cause an exception to be thrown telling me that the "Session is closed".

Rearranging the code to commit transaction 3 first, then 2, then 1, fixed the problem. I now have a better sense of how Spring works, working code, and less hair. I thought I'd write this up in case it helps someone else avoid this simple mistake.

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