ServiceFactory, Struts2, Spring, JPA & Transactional?

[André-John Mas]

Up until now I have been declaring all my service classes in the applicationContext.xml file and passing the service via the constructor. Doing things this way we could easily perform transactional operations, though it was decided that having a having single service factory that can be passed to the Action classes, would be a useful approach for a number of reasons, and then use that to get the services. I am now at the point where I have written the ServiceFactory, and retrieving services from it. The service factory includes the method:

@PersistenceContext
    public void setEntityManager(EntityManager entityManager) ;

The value is then delegated to the services. While all this 'works', I now find msyelf in a position where upon trying to a transaction, I get:

javax.servlet.ServletException: javax.persistence.TransactionRequiredException: no transaction is in progress

There is clearly something I have misunderstood and not doing, though I am not sure what that is. Could anyone help enlighten me?

Just for reference here is my ServiceFactory class:

 
public class ServiceFactoryImpl implements ServiceFactory {

    private static ServiceFactoryImpl instance;

    private Map<Class><?>, BasicService> services;
    private EntityManager entityManager;
    private boolean initialised = false;
    
    public ServiceFactoryImpl() {
    }

    private void init() {
        this.services = new HashMap<Class><?>, BasicService>();
        
        register(UserService.class, new UserServiceImpl());
        // etc ...
        
    }

    public EntityManager getEntityManager() {
        return this.entityManager;
    }
    
    @PersistenceContext
    public void setEntityManager(EntityManager entityManager) {
        this.entityManager = entityManager;
        if ( !initialised ) {
            init();
        }
    }
    
    private void register(Class<?> serviceClass, BasicService serviceImplementation) {
        if (!serviceClass.isInstance(serviceImplementation)) {
            throw new RuntimeException(serviceImplementation.getClass() + " is not an instance of "
                    + serviceClass);
        }
        
        serviceImplementation.setEntityManager(entityManager);

        this.services.put(serviceClass, serviceImplementation);

    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public <T extends BasicService> T getService(Class<T> clazz) {
        T service = (T) services.get(clazz);
        if ( service == null ) {
            throw new RuntimeException("no implementation registered for " + clazz);
        }
               
        return service;
    }


}