Some clarification about Spring @Transactional annotation on a method

First of all, you shouldn’t make DAO methods transactional, but service methods.

Second, using Transactional is a way to let Spring start and commit/rollback transactions for you. So you shouldn’t start and commit transactions yourself.

Third: this will only work if you use a transaction manager that knows how to associate a Hibernate session with the transaction (typically, a HibernateTransactionManager). The session factory should also be handled by Spring, and injected by Spring in your DAOs. The code of the DAO should look like this:

Fourth: you should not open a new session, but get the current one, associated to the current transaction by Spring.

public class PersonDAOImpl implements PersonDAO {

    @Autowired
    private SessionFactory sessionFactory;

    public Integer addPerson(Person p) {
        Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        Integer personID = (Integer) session.save(p);
        return personID;
    }

    public Person getById(int id) {
        Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        Person retrievedPerson = (Person) session.get(Person.class, id);
        return retrievedPerson;
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public List<Person> getPersonsList() {
        Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Person.class);
        return criteria.list();
    }

    public void delete(int id) {
        Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        Person personToDelete = getById(id);
        session.delete(personToDelete);
    }

    public void update(Person personToUpdate) {
        Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
        session.update(personToUpdate);
    }
}

Read the documentation for more information.