How to rollback nested transactions with Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW in integration tests

This is expected behaviour, and is one of the main reasons to use REQUIRES_NEW :

• be able to rollback the new transaction, but commit the outer one
• be able to commit the new transaction, but rollback the outer one

re-populate the database between tests is probably the best solution, and I would use this solution for all the tests: this allows tests to check that everything works correctly, including the commit (which could fail due to flushing, deferred constraints, etc.).

But it you really want to rollback the transaction, a solution would be to add a boolean argument rollbackAtTheEnd to your service, and rollback the transaction if this argument is true.

I added comment to Spring improvement ticket on this. I'll copy it here too:

I worked around this problem by converting all service methods that were declaratively setup like this

@Transactional(propagation = REQUIRES_NEW)public Object doSmth() {  // doSmthThatRequiresNewTx}

to use TransactionTemplate instead:

private TransactionTemplate transactionTemplate;public Object doSmth() {  return transactionTemplate.execute(new TransactionCallback<Object>() {            @Override            public Object doInTransaction(TransactionStatus status) {                // doSmthThatRequiresNewTx            }        });  }

Under tests I configure transactionTemplate's propagation behavior to be PROPAGATION_REQUIRED, under real app I configure transactionTemplate's propagation behaviour to be PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW. It works as expected. The limitation of this workaround is that under tests it is not possible to assert the fact that inner transaction is not rolledback in an exceptional scenario.

The other solution would be to explicitly delete everything doSmth() does in the database in the @AfterTransaction method in test. That 'delete' SQL will be run in the new transaction, as its results would be otherwise rolled back routinely by Spring's TransactionConfiguration default behaviour.