How to manually force a commit in a @Transactional method?

Question

I'm using Spring / Spring-data-JPA and find myself needing to manually force a commit in a unit test. My use case is that I am doing a multi-threaded test in which I have to use data that is persisted before the threads are spawned.

Unfortunately, given that the test is running in a @Transactional transaction, even a flush does not make it accessible to the spawned threads.

   @Transactional   
   public void testAddAttachment() throws Exception{
        final Contract c1 = contractDOD.getNewTransientContract(15);
        contractRepository.save(c1);

        // Need to commit the saveContract here, but don't know how!                
        em.getTransaction().commit();

        List<Thread> threads = new ArrayList<>();
        for( int i = 0; i < 5; i++){
            final int threadNumber = i; 
            Thread t =  new Thread( new Runnable() {
                @Override
                @Transactional
                public void run() {
                    try {
                        // do stuff here with c1

                        // sleep to ensure that the thread is not finished before another thread catches up
                        Thread.sleep(1000);
                    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                }
            });
            threads.add(t);
            t.start();
        }

        // have to wait for all threads to complete
        for( Thread t : threads )
            t.join();

        // Need to validate test results.  Need to be within a transaction here
        Contract c2 = contractRepository.findOne(c1.getId());
    }

I've tried using the entity manager to, but get an error message when I do:

org.springframework.dao.InvalidDataAccessApiUsageException: Not allowed to create transaction on shared EntityManager - use Spring transactions or EJB CMT instead; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: Not allowed to create transaction on shared EntityManager - use Spring transactions or EJB CMT instead
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.EntityManagerFactoryUtils.convertJpaAccessExceptionIfPossible(EntityManagerFactoryUtils.java:293)
    at org.springframework.orm.jpa.aspectj.JpaExceptionTranslatorAspect.ajc$afterThrowing$org_springframework_orm_jpa_aspectj_JpaExceptionTranslatorAspect$1$18a1ac9(JpaExceptionTranslatorAspect.aj:33)

Is there any way to commit the transaction and continue it? I have been unable to find any method that allows me to call a commit().

Answer 1

I had a similar use case during testing hibernate event listeners which are only called on commit.

The solution was to wrap the code to be persistent into another method annotated with REQUIRES_NEW. (In another class) This way a new transaction is spawned and a flush/commit is issued once the method returns.

Keep in mind that this might influence all the other tests! So write them accordingly or you need to ensure that you can clean up after the test ran.