Bug? Transaction timeout....

[modjoe23]

I have a message driven bean which is processing a transaction which cam sometimes run for hours. The main goal I am trying to acheive is to increase the transaction timeout from the default 300 seconds (5 mins) to somehere in hours. The code below demonstrates the number of things I have tried to acheive this, but I have been unsuccessful in every attempt. I am starting to think there may be a bug in one of the transaction annotations. Please help...thanks!

- 1. Tried setting the context from setMessageDrivenContext which is called by the container. I then got the user transaction and tried to set that timeout to > 5 mins but that did not affect the 5 min default trans. timeout. (Please see commented code)

- 2. Tried setting the @TransactionTimeout annotation to a value > 500 but that seems to do nothing...bug?

- 3. Any other suggestions?

@TransactionManagement(TransactionManagementType.BEAN)
@TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED)
@TransactionTimeout(value=800)
public class MDBDataLoadTask implements MessageListener,MessageDrivenBean {
private MessageDrivenContext ctx;

public void onMessage(Message msg)
{
/*
UserTransaction aUT = ctx.getUserTransaction();
aUT.begin();
aUT.setTransactionTimeout(360);
*/

try
{
//Perform a task that will take about this long to run
Thread.sleep(365000);
//aUT.commit();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
/*try{
aUT.setRollbackOnly();}
catch(SystemException se){System.out.println(se.toString());}*/
}
}

@Resource
public void setMessageDrivenContext(MessageDrivenContext ctx) { this.ctx = ctx; }

public void ejbRemove() {ctx=null;}
}

[modjoe23]

I know that I can change the default timeout value from the default 300 seconds in jta-service.xml but I am looking to change the transaction timeout for this transaction only. I've also read the spec but with no luck.

Anybody out there?? Please help!

[peter_kaas]

Any change if you add the @TransactionTimeout to the method instead of the class? I have experienced the same problems you describe but ended up changing the default timeout...

[modjoe23]

Hi Peter,

No that hasn't solved it for me. Please let me know if you find a solution to this problem. Thanks.

[joed]

I found this in the XDoclet reference:

http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/xdoclet/tags/jboss-tags.html

If you look for transaction-timeout, it seems to indicate that the change only applies if the method starts the transaction. Since that's never the case with MDB using REQUIRED, perhaps if you change it to REQUIRES_NEW you might get what you want.

I've got the same issue, and I'm going to try this change soon. I'll post my results once I get a chance to try it out, but I thought I'd pass this guess along first, since you seemed desperate :-)

[modjoe23]

Joed,

Thank you for that. I must have missed it. I will try that as soon as I can and post my results as well.

[joed]

Sigh. It didn't work. If I had thought before trying I would have realized it couldn't. I imagine that the container has its own transaction for the queue, which is timing out because the onMessage() method is taking a long time, even though *my* transaction has a longer time out.

I think I'm going to just spawn a thread in the onMessage() to handle the work, and return immediately. I lose all opportunity for resends, but c'est la vie.

[modjoe23]

That's exactly why I tried to a handle to that transaction and increase it's timeout myself, but that didn't work. There has to be a way to do it!

[thhal]

So, in essence there is no way to control the transaction timeout for an MDB unless you change the global transaction timeout? If that's true, I would consider it a fairly serious flaw in JBoss.

A work around involving new threads won't help me much since it's essential that the popping of the queue must is synchronized with the many inserts that causes the timeout.

[epbernard]

One a JIRA feature request please.

[peter_kaas]

What if you mark your MDB with:

@TransactionManagement(TransactionManagementType.BEAN)

and then roll your own transaction like:

@Resource
private transient MessageDrivenContext context;

...

UserTransaction ut = null;

try {
 ut = context.getUserTransaction();
 ut.setTransactionTimeout(TIMEOUT);
 ut.begin();

 // Do your stuff

 ut.commit();
} catch (Throwable ex) {
 try { if (ut != null) ut.rollback(); } catch (Throwable ex2) { }

 ...
}