Java – Spring ignores @Transactional annotations

In one of our projects, we encountered an issue where Spring ignored @Transactional comments and then failed with the following error.

Error starting ApplicationContext. To display the conditions report
re-run your application with ‘debug’ enabled. 2018-09-13 15:05:18,406
ERROR [main] org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication Application
run failed org.springframework.dao.InvalidDataAccessApiUsageException:
No EntityManager with actual transaction available for current thread
– cannot reliably process ‘remove’ call; nested exception is javax.persistence.TransactionRequiredException: No EntityManager with
actual transaction available for current thread – cannot reliably
process ‘remove’ call at
com.my.service.CacheAService.deleteShortTermCache(CacheAService.java:70)
~[classes/:na]

I found a similar issue, but none of the solutions work for this situation.

• @EnableTransactionManagement exists
• Transaction classes implement interfaces
• The trading method is public
• Transactional methods are not called internally

When I annotate CacheService with @Transactional, everything is back to normal again. But I’m trying to understand why Spring ignores @Transactional on CacheAService.

I tried logging Spring’s transaction interceptor, but didn’t mention CacheA. This is the only relevant content that is logged.

2018-09-13 15:05:18,242 TRACE [main]
org.springframework.transaction.interceptor.TransactionInterceptor
Don’t need to create transaction for
[org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.support.SimpleJpaRepository.deleteByValidity]:
This method isn’t transactional.

This is simplified code. Spring’s ContextRefreshedEvent calls code during application startup.

@Service
public class CacheService implements Cache {

@Autowired
    private CacheA cacheAService;
    @Autowired
    private CacheB cacheBService;

@Override
    public void clearCache() {
        cacheAService.deleteShortTermCache();
        cacheBService.deleteAll();
    }
}

public interface CacheA {
    void deleteShortTermCache();
}

@Service
@Transactional(readOnly = true)
public class CacheAService implements CacheA {

@Autowired
    private CacheARepository cacheARepository;

@Override
    @Transactional
    public void deleteShortTermCache() {
        cacheARepository.deleteByValidity(CacheValidity.SHORT_TERM);
    }
}

public interface CacheB {
    void deleteAll();
}

@Service
@Transactional(readOnly = true)
public class CacheBService implements CacheB {

@Autowired
    private CacheBRepository cacheBRepository;

@Override
    @Transactional
    public void deleteAll {
        cacheBRepository.deleteAll();
    }
}

public enum CacheValidity {
    SHORT_TERM,
    LONG_TERM
}

@Repository
public interface CacheARepository extends JpaRepository<CacheItem, Integer> {
    void deleteByValidity(CacheValidity validity);
}

public enum CacheItemKey {
    AVAILABLE,
    FUTURE,
    AVAILABLE_UTM,
    FUTURE_UTM,
    REGION
}

@Entity
@Table(name = "cache_item")
public class CacheItem {

@Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "cache_item_id_seq")
    @SequenceGenerator(name = "cache_item_id_seq", sequenceName = "cache_item_id_seq", allocationSize = 1)
    private Integer id;

@Column(nullable = false, unique = true)
    @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private CacheItemKey key;

@Column(nullable = false)
    private String value;

@Column(name = "date_modified", nullable = false)
    @Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
    private Date dateModified;

@Column(nullable = false)
    @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
    private CacheValidity validity;

public Integer getId() {
        return id;
    }

public void setId(final Integer id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

public CacheItemKey getKey() {
        return key;
    }

public void setKey(final CacheItemKey key) {
        this.key = key;
    }

public String getValue() {
        return value;
    }

public void setValue(final String value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

public Date getDateModified() {
        return dateModified;
    }

public void setDateModified(final Date dateModified) {
        this.dateModified = dateModified;
    }

public CacheValidity getValidity() {
        return validity;
    }

public void setValidity(final CacheValidity validity) {
        this.validity = validity;
    }

}

Edit:
After some digging, I found this in the logs.

2018-09-14 06:24:11,174 INFO [localhost-startStop-1]
org.springframework.context.support.PostProcessorRegistrationDelegate$BeanPostProcessorChecker
Bean ‘cacheAService’ of type [com.my.service.CacheAService] is not
eligible for getting processed by all BeanPostProcessors (for example:
not eligible for auto-proxying)

We found that this issue was caused by Spring Boot’s automatic configuration. Since automatic configuration already sets up transaction management, our @EnableTransactionManagement custom configuration breaks the instantiation of Transaction Advisor. Removing @EnableTransactionManagement from our config solved the problem.