How to manage transaction for database and file system in Java EE environment?

卢声远 Shengyuan Lu picture 卢声远 Shengyuan Lu · Mar 11, 2010 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I store file’s attributes (size, update time…) in database. So the problem is how to manage transaction for database and file.

In a Java EE environment, JTA is just able to manage database transaction. In case, updating database is successful but file operation fails, should I write file-rollback method for this? Moreover, file operation in EJB container violates EJB spec.

What’s your opinion?

Answer

ewernli picture ewernli · Mar 14, 2010

Access to external resources such as a file system should ideally go through a JCA connector. Though there are several posts around discussing this, I never found a ready-to-use JCA connector for transactional access to the file system, so I started to write one:

Regarding other projects:

Note that as soon as you have more than one transactional participant, the app. server really need to use distributed transaction and things get more complicated. You must not underestimate this complexity (e.g. database have another timeout mechanism for distributed transaction).

Another lightweight approach to consider is to use a SFSB that writes on the file system. If you implement SessionSynchronization interface, you get beforeCompletion and afterCompletion callbacks. The later indicates whether the transaction was committed or rolled back and you do cleanup if necessary. You can then implement a transactional behavior.