Where should "@Transactional" be placed Service Layer or DAO

Question

Firstly it is possible that I am asking something that has been asked and answered before but I could not get a search result back. We define transactional annotations on service layer typical spring hibernate crud is usually

Controller->Manager->Dao->Orm .

I now have a situation where I need to choose between the domain model based on client site. Say client A is using my domain model all is good but then an other client site would give me a web service and not be using our domain model.

Which layer should I be replacing . I believe it has to be DAO which will be getting me data from web service and sending it back.i.e two separately written DAO layers and plugged in based on scenario.

I have now realized that we have been doing tight coupling (if there is such a thing or say not having loose coupling) when we put @Transactional in Service layer. So many brains can not be wrong or are they (I doubt it).

So question is "Where should "@Transactional" be placed Service Layer or DAO ?" and is it service layer downwards I should be replacing.

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Eleven years on and still relevant . If I look back at the project somethings were obviously wrong with my understanding of Domain model back then . I was regarding ORM layer as domain model and we wanted to work with ORM and detached entities and no have any data mapping and not have any DTOs. That was the trend those days. These days Domain Model is not the ORM and having a proper Domain model and using ORM or Webservices are datasources take care of this issue. Like many pointed out yes Service is the right place for it and have proper domain model and not regard JPA (ORM) as domain model.

Answer 1

Ideally, Service layer (Manager) represents your business logic and hence it should be annotated with @Transactional.

Service layer may call different DAOs to perform DB operations. Lets assume a situation where you have 3 DAO operations in a service method. If your 1st DAO operation failed, other two may be still passed and you will end up with an inconsistent DB state. Annotating Service layer can save you from such situations.

Answer 2

You are going to want your services to be transactional. If your DAOs are transactional, and you call different DAOs in each service, then you would have multiple transactions, which is not what you want. Make the service calls transactional, and all DAO calls inside those methods will participate in the transactions for the method.

Answer 3

i will suggest to put @Transactional in Service layer methods since we can have multiple DAO implementations. by using this we can made our services will be transactional. refer

best practice is to use A generic BasicService to offer common services.

The Service is the best place for putting @Transactional, service layer should hold the detail-level use case behavior for a user interaction that would logically go in a transaction. in this way we can have maintain separation between web application code and business logic.

There are a lot of CRUD applications that don't have any significant business logic, for them having a service layer that just passes stuff through between the controllers and data access objects is not useful. In these cases we can put transaction annotation on Dao.

So in practice you can put them in either place, it's up to you.

By having multiple calls in your service you need @Transactional in service. different calls to service will execute in different transactions if you put @Transactional in service.

Answer 4

It's of a personal choice based on application types, if application is layerd across many modules and majority of operations are @CRUD based ,then having @transactional annotation at service level makes more sence.. engine type application like schedulers , job servers,@etl report apps, where sessions and user concept does not exists, then propagational transaction at context level is most suitable... we should not end up creating clusterd transactions by putting @transactional every where ending up transactional anti patters...anyways for pragmatic transaction control JTA2 is most suitable answer...again it depends on weather you can use it in a given situations...

Answer 5

You should use @Transactional at service layer, if you want to change the domain model for client B where you have to provide the same data in a different model,you can change the domain model without impacting the DAO layer by providing a different service or by creating a interface and implementing the interface in different model and with the same service populate the model based on the client.This decision is based on the business requirement and the scope of the project.

Answer 6

We should use @Transactional only if we have to manipulat data between multiple database or table or repositories, service should rollback transaction if one repository faild to insert data for exemple, in this case i think it's best practices to add @Transctional on services level.

but we wi never add @Transactional on Controller level !

Answer 7

i have heard in a programming class,that dao layer is responsible for interacting with database, and service is a set of operations might be with dao and therefore database or not and that set of operation is in one transaction, mean is better service be transactional.