How to propagate Spring transaction to another thread?

Question

Perhaps, I am doing something wrong, but I can't find a good way out for the following situation.

I would like to unit test a service that uses Spring Batch underneath to execute jobs. The jobs are executed via pre-configured AsyncTaskExecutor in separate threads. In my unit test I would like to:

1. Create few domain objects and persist them via DAO
2. Invoke the service method to launch the job
3. Wait until the job is completed
4. Use DAO to retrieve domain objects and check their state

Obviously, all above should be executed within one transaction, but unfortunately, transactions are not propagated to new threads (I understand the rationale behind this).

Ideas that came to my mind:

• Commit the transaction#1 after step (1). Is not good, as the DB state should be rolled back after the unit test.
• Use Isolation.READ_UNCOMMITTED in job configuration. But this requires two different configurations for test and for production.

Answer 1

I think the simplest solution would be configure the JobLauncher with a SyncTaskExecutor during test execution - this way the job is executed in the same thread as the test and shares the transaction.

The task executor configuration can be moved to a separate spring configuration xml file. Have two versions of it - one with SyncTaskExecutor which is used during testing and the other AsyncTaskExecutor that is used for production runs.