Spring Unittests with Manual Transactionhandling

Today I wanted to unittest a method that uses multiple threads, each running within its own transaction (using the REQUIRES_NEW propagation). Such a test must have the following steps:

1. Start a transaction
2. Do the test setup
3. Commit the transaction (otherwise the setup data are not visible to the method-under-test)
4. Execute the method-under-test
5. Perform the assertions

For this, Spring provides some helpful classes:

• My test is a subclass of AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests (instead of AbstractTransactionalTestNGSpringContextTests)
• The testclass autowires a TransactionTemplate, which is defined in the context XML:

  <bean id="transactionTemplate" class="org.springframework.transaction.support.TransactionTemplate">
    <property name="transactionManager" ref="jtaTransactionManager"/>
  </bean>

• The test setup uses the TransactionTemplate to execute a TransactionCallback (or TransactionCallbackWithoutResult)