Threading in Spring - multithreading

Question

I'm trying to do some optimization in my code and would like to spawn a thread where I do a time consuming operation. During the implementation of that optimization I was running into an issue which was driving me crazy. I simplified the issue and created a test case for that specific issue: (I'm using SpringJUnit4ClassRunner so the transaction is properly started at the beginning of the testCRUD method)
Could someone help me understand why the foundParent is null in the thread ?
private Semaphore sema = new Semaphore(0, false);
private long parentId;
#Test
public void testCRUD() {
//create
DBParent parent = null;
{
parent = new DBParent();
parentDao.persist(parent);
parentId = parent.getId();
assertTrue(parentId > 0);
parentDao.flush();
}
(new Thread(
new Runnable() {
public void run()
{
System.out.println("Start adding childs !");
DBParent foundParent = parentDao.findById(parentId);
assertTrue(foundParent != null); //ASSERTION FAILS HERE !!!!
System.out.println("Releasing semaphore !");
sema.release();
System.out.println("End adding childs !");
}
})).start();
try {
System.out.println("Acquiring semaphore !");
sema.acquire();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
=============================EDITED===================================
As per one comment suggestion, I created a threadManager bean which spawn the thread. Here is the code of the threadManager:
public class ThreadManager {
#Transactional(propagation=Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
public void executeTask(String Name, Runnable task) {
(new Thread(task, Name)).start();
}
}
Then in the previous test, instead of staring the thread manually, I just post it in the thread manager like this:
#Autowired private ParentDao parentDao;
#Autowired private ThreadManager threadManager;
private Semaphore sema = new Semaphore(0, false);
private long parentId;
#Test
public void testCRUD() {
//create
DBParent parent = null;
{
parent = new DBParent();
parentDao.persist(parent);
parentId = parent.getId();
assertTrue(parentId > 0);
parentDao.flush();
}
threadManager.executeTask("BG processing...",
new Runnable() {
public void run()
{
System.out.println("Start adding childs !");
DBParent foundParent = parentDao.findById(parentId);
assertTrue(foundParent != null); //ASSERTION FAILS HERE !!!!
System.out.println("Releasing semaphore !");
sema.release();
System.out.println("End adding childs !");
}
});
try {
System.out.println("Acquiring semaphore !");
sema.acquire();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Unfortunately this doesn't work either !!! :-(

Answer 1

The transaction context is bound to the thread. So the code in the spawned thread doesn't run in the same transaction context as the code in the initial thread. So, due to transaction isolation (the I in ACID), the spawned thread doesn't see what the initial thread's transaction is inserting in the database.

Answer 2

You can bind Spring transaction to a new thread, to run transactions & Hibernate/JPA access in it. But this has to be a different TX and JPA/HB session from other threads.
Spring code for OpenSessionInViewFilter, is a reasonable an example of how to bind Hibernate session to Spring's TX management. You can strip this down to fairly minimal code.
See:
org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.support.OpenSessionInViewFilter
OpenSessionInViewFilter.doFilterInternal() -- this is where it actually binds it
TransactionSynchronizationManager.bindResource()
TransactionSynchronizationManager.unbindResource()
TransactionSynchronizationManager.getResource()
In one project (IIRC) I wrapped this functionality into a 'ServerThreadHb' class, to setup & save previous thread-bindings on construction -- with a restore() method to be called in a finally block, to restore previous bindings.
For your posted code sample, there isn't much point in running work on a separate thread -- since you synchronously wait for the work to be done. However I assume you were planning to remove that constraint & extend that functionality.