Spring Transaction Synchronization of JDBC and JMS

Question

I have a spring web app running on jboss that is currently configured to use the HibernateTransactionManager for db transactions and the JmsTransactionManager for jms. For jms we use Camel and ActiveMQ, our database is DB2. Within a transaction I need to write a number of records to the database and send two asynchronous jms messages. The jms messages are event notifications and I only want them to be sent if the database transaction commits.

I am willing to accept the risk of the communication with the broker failing after the jdbc transaction has already committed (and thus no messages sent but db committed) so I do not think I need proper XA.

I believe that what I need is "best efforts" transaction management using spring transaction synchronization.

The spring documentation sort of hints at the fact that spring will synchronize the two transactions and commit the jms transaction only after the jdbc transaction has been committed - but I don't think it is very clear. The spring documentation here http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/transaction.html#tx-resource-synchronization doesn't go into enough detail about how it works.

I have found a couple of other sources that say spring will do what I want including some javadoc below, and I have written some integration tests that also show it.

http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/api/org/springframework/jms/support/JmsAccessor.html#setSessionTransacted%28boolean%29 The javadoc on setSessionTransacted here sounds like exactly what I want.

From what I have seen I think creating the Camel JmsConfiguration with transacted set to true like this is enough:

<bean id="jmsConfig" class="org.apache.camel.component.jms.JmsConfiguration">
    <property name="connectionFactory" ref="pooledConnectionFactory"/>
    <property name="transacted" value="true"/>
    <property name="concurrentConsumers" value="10"/>
</bean>

However I need to convince someone I work with who is a bit skeptical and thinks that my integration test only works because of a poorly documented side effect rather than a intentional spring feature.

So my question is - Am I correct that spring can be relied upon to synchronize the transactions and always commit the jms transaction after the jdbc transaction or is that not something that I should rely on, and could you point me at any official documentation that says that clearly? And I guess in general is this a good approach to take or should we be managing these transactions in a different way?

Answer 1

This article might be of help Distributed transactions in Spring, with and without XA. I don't think it covers your case specifically - sending message + updating database.