DEV Community

Michael Born
Michael Born

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at michaelborn.me

Cross-engine transaction detection in Hibernate v3+

UPDATE: Now with Adobe support!

So, this is embarrassing. This article claimed to offer a one-liner with Adobe and Lucee compatibility, but I completely neglected to actually test it on ACF before I wrote the blog post. (I thought I'd tested it... evidently not.) I realized this week after attempting to use my "cross-compatible" transaction detection code that it's not cross-compatible at all!

Bottom line: I updated the article with a properly-tested, fully cross-engine-compatible snippet to detect transactional context on both Adobe CF and Lucee. You're welcome.


We do a lot of ORM work at Ortus, and recently I have been on a bit of a Hibernate binge. One of the important things to note when working with Hibernate is that ORM queries may behave differently inside a transaction block than they do outside a transaction block. More importantly, the transactional handling in, say, Lucee 5.3 begins to break down when working with nested transactions.

I digress, but let's just say it's important to know when the current code is inside a transaction context.

Previously, the best knowledge we had said to run this on Adobe:

// ADOBE ONLY!
var isInTransaction = createObject(“java”, “coldfusion.tagext.sql.TransactionTag”).getCurrent()
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

and something like this on Lucee:

// LUCEE ONLY!
var isInTransaction = getPageContext().getDataSourceManager().isAutoCommit() ? false : true;
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

But digging through the Hibernate Session docs, I found a wonderful little method called isTransactionInProgress. And just like that, here's a CFML method to wrap it and consistently detect the transactional context:

boolean function isInTransaction(){
    if ( listFindNoCase( "Lucee", server.coldfusion.productname ) ) {
        return ORMGetSession().isTransactionInProgress();
    } else {
        return ORMGetSession().getActualSession().isTransactionInProgress();
    }
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

That little beauty works

  1. across CFML engines from Lucee to Adobe ColdFusion
  2. across multiple Hibernate versions from v3.x through v5.x

Now, to be fair, I haven't really stress-tested this. It's possible there are a few situations where Hibernate doesn't yet know a transaction has begun. But so far... it works, and works well!

Until next time!

Top comments (0)