Managing JTA transaction in web client

[sshort]

Hello,

I am using JBoss 4.2.2GA and I would like to use a JTA based transaction within
a web client to span multiple stateless EJB session beans. Each stateless bean
uses a Hibernate EntityManager and is declared to use BMT. My understanding is
that this should work and the section titled "UserTransaction Support" of the
JBoss doc http://docs.jboss.org/admin-devel/Chap4.html supports this.

What I am finding is that the web client can lookup and begin a transaction, but
that the EJB does not see this transaction. I can see this by checking the
transaction status within the EJB itself.

Here is a simplified example based on the JBoss 'registration' example
application. This is the servlet code:

protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request,
 HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
 UserTransaction tx = null;
 try {
 InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext();

 SimpleUserManagement userManagement = (SimpleUserManagement) ctx.lookup("TestApplication/SimpleUserManagement/local");
 tx = (UserTransaction)new InitialContext().lookup("UserTransaction");

 String username = request.getParameter("username");
 String name = request.getParameter("name");
 String password = request.getParameter("password");

 User user = new User(name, password, username);

 log.info("Before tx.begin, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 tx.begin();

 log.info("Before saveUser, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 userManagement.saveUser(user);

 log.info("Before tx.commit, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 tx.commit();
 } catch (Exception ex) {
 if (tx != null) {
 try {
 int status = tx.getStatus();
 if (JTAHelper.isInProgress(status)) {
 tx.rollback();
 }
 }
 catch (Exception e) {
 log.warn("Failed to rollback user update", e);
 }
 }
 log.error("User update failed", ex);
 response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE, "User management services are not currently available");
 return;
 }
 }

And this is the EJB code:

public void saveUser(final User user) {

 UserTransaction tx = null;

 try {
 tx = sessionContext.getUserTransaction();

 if (JTAHelper.isInProgress(TransactionHelper.getTransactionStatus(tx))) {
 log.info("A transaction is already in progress");
 log.info("Before em.persist, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 em.persist(user);
 } else {
 log.info("A transaction is NOT in progress");

 log.info("Before tx.begin, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 tx.begin();

 log.info("Before em.persist, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 em.persist(user);

 log.info("Before tx.commit, transaction status = " + getTransactionStatusString(tx.getStatus()));
 tx.commit();
 }
 }
 catch (Exception ex) {
 log.error("Failed to modify user", ex);
 }
 }

And this is the resulting log output showing that the EJB does not see that
the servlet has started a transaction:

[SimpleServlet] Before tx.begin, transaction status = NO_TRANSACTION
 [SimpleServlet] Before saveUser, transaction status = ACTIVE
 [SimpleUserManagementBean] A transaction is NOT in progress
 [SimpleUserManagementBean] Before tx.begin, transaction status = NO_TRANSACTION
 [SimpleUserManagementBean] Before em.persist, transaction status = ACTIVE
 [SimpleUserManagementBean] Before tx.commit, transaction status = ACTIVE
 [SimpleServlet] Before tx.commit, transaction status = ACTIVE

Regards
Steve