hibernate, mysql, glassfish v3, and JTA datasource

Question

I'm attempting to use hibernate entity manager with mysql and glassfish. I'm getting the following error when attempting to use a JTA datasource:

Caused by: org.hibernate.HibernateException: The chosen transaction strategy requires access to the JTA TransactionManager
        at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.<init>(SessionFactoryImpl.java:376)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1367)
        at org.hibernate.cfg.AnnotationConfiguration.buildSessionFactory(AnnotationConfiguration.java:858)
        at org.hibernate.ejb.Ejb3Configuration.buildEntityManagerFactory(Ejb3Configuration.java:733)
        ... 37 more

Here is how I have configured my persistence.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="1.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd">
  <persistence-unit name="myPU" transaction-type="JTA">
    <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
    <jta-data-source>jdbc/mysql</jta-data-source>
    <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyFile</class>
    <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyRole</class>
    <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyUser</class>
    <exclude-unlisted-classes>true</exclude-unlisted-classes>
    <properties>
      <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
      <property name="hibernate.show.sql" value="true" />
    </properties>

However, when I configure a non-jta datasource, it works fine

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <persistence version="1.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd">
      <persistence-unit name="myPU" transaction-type="JTA">
        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
        <non-jta-data-source>jdbc/mysql</non-jta-data-source>
        <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyFile</class>
        <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyRole</class>
        <class>com.my.shared.entity.MyUser</class>
        <exclude-unlisted-classes>true</exclude-unlisted-classes>
        <properties>
          <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
          <property name="hibernate.show.sql" value="true" />
        </properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>

That's all well and good, but I would really like to use:

em.persist(myObject);

instead of:

em.getTransaction().begin();
em.persist(myObject);
em.getTransaction().commit();

Am I missing something with the hibernate configuration, or is it even possible to use a JTA datasource?

Answer 1

It seems like for your configuration, container-managed transactions are used by default. In this case you need to define a way of transaction synchronization so the persistence layer is notified (and can update the 2nd level cache for example). So you need to define manager_lookup_class property as following:

// For GlassFish:
hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class=org.hibernate.transaction.SunONETransactionManagerLookup
// For WebSpere:
hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class=org.hibernate.transaction.WebSphereExtendedJTATransactionLookup
// For JBoss:
hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class=org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup
// For OpenEJB:
hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class=org.apache.openejb.hibernate.TransactionManagerLookup

Also you have to mark business methods that access data layer as "transactional". For that you need to mark them with @javax.ejb.TransactionAttribute(REQUIRED) (see here for more information about this annotation).

You also have an option to switch to bean-managed transactions. You can do it by saying:

hibernate.transaction.factory_class=org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory

Then the bean is responsible for starting/ending the transaction:

org.hibernate.Session session = ...;
org.hibernate.Transaction tx = null;
try {
    tx = session.beginTransaction();
    session.createQuery(...); // do some staff
    tx.commit();
} catch (HibernateException e)
{
    if (tx != null) {
        tx.rollback();
    }
}