Recovering from hibernate optimistic locking exception

Question

I have a method like this:

@Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
public void doSomeWork(){
 Entity = entity = dao.loadEntity();
 // do some related work
 ...
 try {
  dao.saveEntity(entity);
 }
 catch(StaleObjectStateException sose){
  dao.flush(entity);
  doSomeWork();
 }
}

I was expecting that by using REQUIRES_NEW transaction propagation and the recursion shown, the StaleObjectStateException would eventually clear but this isn't the case.

How do I recover from this exception?

Answer 1

Turns out there's a bit of a 'gatcha' which I've overlooked...

From spring docs

In proxy mode (which is the default), only 'external' method calls coming in through the proxy will be intercepted. This means that 'self-invocation', i.e. a method within the target object calling some other method of the target object, won't lead to an actual transaction at runtime even if the invoked method is marked with @Transactional!

Because I've been recursing internally, the transaction demarcation wasn't getting applied.

The solution is to recurse via the proxy, like this...

@Autowired
private ApplicationContext applicationContext;

@Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
public void doSomeWork(){
 Entity = entity = dao.loadEntity();
 // do some related work
 ...
 try {
  dao.saveEntity(entity);
 }
 catch(StaleObjectStateException sose){
  dao.flush(entity);
  applicationContext.getBean(this.getClass()).doSomeWork();
 }
}