Transaction marked as rollback only: How do I find the cause

When you mark your method as @Transactional, occurrence of any exception inside your method will mark the surrounding TX as roll-back only (even if you catch them). You can use other attributes of @Transactional annotation to prevent it of rolling back like:

@Transactional(rollbackFor=MyException.class, noRollbackFor=MyException2.class)

I finally understood the problem:

methodA() {    methodB()}@Transactional(noRollbackFor = Exception.class)methodB() {    ...    try {        methodC()    } catch (...) {...}    log("OK");}@TransactionalmethodC() {    throw new ...();}

What happens is that even though the methodB has the right annotation, the methodC does not. When the exception is thrown, the second @Transactional marks the first transaction as Rollback only anyway.

To quickly fetch the causing exception without the need to re-code or rebuild, set a breakpoint on

org.hibernate.ejb.TransactionImpl.setRollbackOnly() // Hibernate < 4.3, ororg.hibernate.jpa.internal.TransactionImpl() // as of Hibernate 4.3

and go up in the stack, usually to some Interceptor. There you can read the causing exception from some catch block.