4.2.2. Using JTA

If your persistence layer runs in an application server (e.g. behind EJB3 session beans), every datasource connection obtained internally by the entity manager will automatically be part of the global JTA transaction. Hibernate offers two strategies for this integration.

If you use bean-managed transactions (BMT), the code will look like this:

// BMT idiom
@Resource public UserTransaction utx;
@Resource public EntityManagerFactory factory;

public void doBusiness() {
    EntityManager em = factory.createEntityManager();
    try {

    // do some work
    ...

    utx.commit();
}
catch (RuntimeException e) {
    if (utx != null) utx.rollback();
    throw e; // or display error message
}
finally {
    em.close();
}

With Container Managed Transactions (CMT) in an EJB3 container, transaction demarcation is done in session bean annotations or deployment descriptors, not programatically. The EntityManager will automatically be flushed on transaction completion (and if you have injected or lookup the EntityManager, it will be also closed automatically). If an exception occurs during the EntityManager use, transaction rollback occurs automatically if you don't catch the exception. Since EntityManager exceptions are RuntimeExceptions they will rollback the transaction as per the EJB specification (system exception vs. application exception).

It is important to let Hibernate EntityManager define the hibernate.transaction.factory_class (ie not overriding this value). Remember to also set org.hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class.

If you work in a CMT environment, you might also want to use the same entity manager in different parts of your code. Typically, in a non-managed environment you would use a ThreadLocal variable to hold the entity manager, but a single EJB request might execute in different threads (e.g. session bean calling another session bean). The EJB3 container takes care of the persistence context propagation for you. Either using injection or lookup, the EJB3 container will return an entity manager with the same persistence context bound to the JTA context if any, or create a new one and bind it (see Section 1.2.4, “Persistence context propagation” .)

Our entity manager/transaction management idiom for CMT and EJB3 container-use is reduced to this:

//CMT idiom through injection
@PersistenceContext(name="sample") EntityManager em;

In other words, all you have to do in a managed environment is to inject the EntityManager, do your data access work, and leave the rest to the container. Transaction boundaries are set declaratively in the annotations or deployment descriptors of your session beans. The lifecycle of the entity manager and persistence context is completely managed by the container.

When using particular Hibernate native APIs, one caveat has to be remembered: after_statement connection release mode. Due to a silly limitation of the JTA spec, it is not possible for Hibernate to automatically clean up any unclosed ScrollableResults or Iterator instances returned by scroll() or iterate(). You must release the underlying database cursor by calling ScrollableResults.close() or Hibernate.close(Iterator) explicity from a finally block. (Of course, most applications can easily avoid using scroll() or iterate() at all from the CMT code.)