(Quick Reference)

7.6 Programmatic Transactions - Reference Documentation

Authors: Graeme Rocher, Peter Ledbrook, Marc Palmer, Jeff Brown, Luke Daley, Burt Beckwith, Lari Hotari

Version: 3.1.8

7.6 Programmatic Transactions

Grails is built on Spring and uses Spring's Transaction abstraction for dealing with programmatic transactions. However, GORM classes have been enhanced to make this simpler with the withTransaction method. This method has a single parameter, a Closure, which has a single parameter which is a Spring TransactionStatus instance.

Here's an example of using withTransaction in a controller methods:

def transferFunds() {
    Account.withTransaction { status ->
        def source = Account.get(params.from)
        def dest = Account.get(params.to)

def amount = params.amount.toInteger() if (source.active) { if (dest.active) { source.balance -= amount dest.amount += amount } else { status.setRollbackOnly() } } } }

In this example we rollback the transaction if the destination account is not active. Also, if an unchecked Exception or Error (but not a checked Exception, even though Groovy doesn't require that you catch checked exceptions) is thrown during the process the transaction will automatically be rolled back.

You can also use "save points" to rollback a transaction to a particular point in time if you don't want to rollback the entire transaction. This can be achieved through the use of Spring's SavePointManager interface.

The withTransaction method deals with the begin/commit/rollback logic for you within the scope of the block.