Questions about tx in Spring

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hi.
I have some questions about Transaction management in Spring.
Consider the followig lines from Spring's docs:

<bean id="petStore" class="org.springframework.transaction.interceptor.TransactionProxyFactoryBean">
  <property name="transactionManager" ref="txManager"/>
  <property name="target" ref="petStoreTarget"/>
  <property name="transactionAttributes">
    <props>
      <prop key="insert*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED,-MyCheckedException</prop>
      <prop key="update*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED</prop>
      <prop key="*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED,readOnly</prop>
    </props>
  </property>
</bean>

1. Can I specify another targets or each intercepter requires only one target ?
2. What do <prop key="insert*"><prop key="update*"><prop key="*"> mean ?
Thanks.

[Reid M. Pinchback]

insert* and the rest are just naming patterns like Unix shell globbing. A pattern of "*" is more general, "insert*" is more specific. Most specific match should take effect, I believe.

Not sure of the easiest way to deal with multiple targets, but you can cut down on the boilerplate by extending a bean definition (parent=... instead of class=...). There is a more powerful idiom involving pointcuts and autoproxy, but I haven't mucked around with it.

[Ken Krebs]

Interceptors are meant to be stateless and can be used with multiple targets.

[Ken Krebs]

I should clarify, TransactionInterceptor is threadsafe. Some other interceptors may not be.

[Sabarish Sasidharan]

Each interceptor supports only one target when using TransactionProxyFactoryBean. You can check out BeanNameAutoProxyCreator to support multiple targets (thereby avoiding having to put in a 5 line xml fragment for each target)