Distributed Transactions With JTA

Spring Boot supports distributed JTA transactions across multiple XA resources by using a transaction manager retrieved from JNDI.

When a JTA environment is detected, Spring’s JtaTransactionManager is used to manage transactions. Auto-configured JMS, DataSource, and JPA beans are upgraded to support XA transactions. You can use standard Spring idioms, such as @Transactional, to participate in a distributed transaction. If you are within a JTA environment and still want to use local transactions, you can set the spring.jta.enabled property to false to disable the JTA auto-configuration.

Using a Jakarta EE Managed Transaction Manager

If you package your Spring Boot application as a war or ear file and deploy it to a Jakarta EE application server, you can use your application server’s built-in transaction manager. Spring Boot tries to auto-configure a transaction manager by looking at common JNDI locations (java:comp/UserTransaction, java:comp/TransactionManager, and so on). When using a transaction service provided by your application server, you generally also want to ensure that all resources are managed by the server and exposed over JNDI. Spring Boot tries to auto-configure JMS by looking for a ConnectionFactory at the JNDI path (java:/JmsXA or java:/XAConnectionFactory), and you can use the spring.datasource.jndi-name property to configure your DataSource.

Mixing XA and Non-XA JMS Connections

When using JTA, the primary JMS ConnectionFactory bean is XA-aware and participates in distributed transactions. You can inject into your bean without needing to use any @Qualifier:

Java
Kotlin

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory;

public class MyBean {

	public MyBean(ConnectionFactory connectionFactory) {
		// ...
	}

}

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory

class MyBean(connectionFactory: ConnectionFactory?)

In some situations, you might want to process certain JMS messages by using a non-XA ConnectionFactory. For example, your JMS processing logic might take longer than the XA timeout.

If you want to use a non-XA ConnectionFactory, you can the nonXaJmsConnectionFactory bean:

Java
Kotlin

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier;

public class MyBean {

	public MyBean(@Qualifier("nonXaJmsConnectionFactory") ConnectionFactory connectionFactory) {
		// ...
	}

}

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier

class MyBean(@Qualifier("nonXaJmsConnectionFactory") connectionFactory: ConnectionFactory?)

For consistency, the jmsConnectionFactory bean is also provided by using the bean alias xaJmsConnectionFactory:

Java
Kotlin

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier;

public class MyBean {

	public MyBean(@Qualifier("xaJmsConnectionFactory") ConnectionFactory connectionFactory) {
		// ...
	}

}

import jakarta.jms.ConnectionFactory
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier

class MyBean(@Qualifier("xaJmsConnectionFactory") connectionFactory: ConnectionFactory?)

Supporting an Embedded Transaction Manager

The XAConnectionFactoryWrapper and XADataSourceWrapper interfaces can be used to support embedded transaction managers. The interfaces are responsible for wrapping XAConnectionFactory and XADataSource beans and exposing them as regular ConnectionFactory and DataSource beans, which transparently enroll in the distributed transaction. DataSource and JMS auto-configuration use JTA variants, provided you have a JtaTransactionManager bean and appropriate XA wrapper beans registered within your ApplicationContext.