What is the difference between defining @Transactional on class vs method

In case 1 @Transactional is applied to every public individual method. Private and Protected methods are Ignored by Spring.

Spring applies the class-level annotation to all public methods of
this class that we did not annotate with @Transactional. However, if
we put the annotation on a private or protected method, Spring will
ignore it without an error.

In case 2 @Transactional is only applied to method2(), not on method1()

Case 1:
– Invoking method1() -> a transaction is started. When method1() calls method2() no new transaction is started, because there is already one

Case 2:
– Invoking method1() -> no transaction is started. When method1() calls method2() NO new transaction is started. This is because @Transactional does not work when calling a method from within the same class. It would work if you would call method2() from another class.

From the spring reference manual:

In proxy mode (which is the default), only external method calls coming in through the proxy are intercepted. This means that self-invocation, in effect, a method within the target object calling another method of the target object, will not lead to an actual transaction at runtime even if the invoked method is marked with @Transactional. Also, the proxy must be fully initialized to provide the expected behaviour so you should not rely on this feature in your initialization code, i.e. @PostConstruct.

Leave a Comment