Spring CrudRepository save doesn't throw until call to find?

Question

I'm new to Spring JPA and Hibernate and I ran in the following behavior. I successfully created CrudRepositorys for my JPA-annotated entity in org.mypackage.repository and annotation-based transactional service in org.mypackage.service.jpa which in turn calls the methods from injected CrudRepositorys. Here's a snippet of my configuration file (I basically copied the example from Pro Spring 3):

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">
    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="emf"/>
</bean>
<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager"/>
<context:annotation-config/>
<context:component-scan base-package="org.mypackage.service.jpa"/>
<jpa:repositories base-package="org.mypackage.repository"
                  entity-manager-factory-ref="emf"
                  transaction-manager-ref="transactionManager"/>

I omitted the emf bean since it has been working very well so far with all my entities for all of the methods in the CrudRepositorys (wrapped in transactional methods in my service). So it looks like every time I create an entity the service starts a transaction and commits my changes if any.

Now I'm trying to test error conditions so I created one entity with a field that violates a constraint, e.g., a null value in a non-nullable column, and then try to persist it with the appropriate (transactional) method from my service and no exception is thrown. In my @After method I call findAll and boom, there's the exception:

org.springframework.dao.DataIntegrityViolationException: could not execute statement; SQL [n/a]; constraint [null]; nested exception is org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: could not execute statement
...
Caused by: org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: could not execute statement
...
Caused by: org.h2.jdbc.JdbcSQLException: NULL not allowed for column "FKSOMEID"; SQL statement:
INSERT INTO ....

I tried changing the JPA parameters of Hibernate, e.g., setting hibernate.jdbc.batch_size to 1 but that didn't seem to do anything. It looks like the insert doesn't get executed until I call findAll(), while I would expect to get an exception from the transaction that saves the bad record. This behavior is very counter intuitive and will make it very hard to debug my application, so I'm guessing I messed something up here. Does any body have an idea?

Thanks

Giovanni

Answer 1

I figured it out: I should've mentioned that I was testing this from an instance of AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests annotated with:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"classpath:config.xml"})

and with injected DataSource and JPA service.

I didn't realize that Spring automatically rolls back all the changes at the end of the test (I guess after any @After method) and I guess that means it executes all the SQL in one transaction or something like that. Bottom line, if I don't extend AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests I see the expected exceptions right away. I am now using AbstractJUnit4SpringContextTests instead.