`@Transactional` not working for Spring 2 controller

Question

I have an old controller within my app that is defined as a spring bean in xml and makes use of Spring's SimpleFormController. I've tried to make the processes within the onSubmit method of the controller transactional by adding the @Transactional annotation but it doesn't work. According to this guide the invocation of the annotation must happen "outside of the bean", does this mean that the annotation cannot be used in old Spring controllers like mine? Are there any alternatives or workarounds?

The reason I know it's not working is because 1) changes to the db are not rolled back on error (this is despite the fact that I have defined rollbackFor = Exception.class, and even in some instances used TransactionAspectSupport.currentTransactionStatus().setRollbackOnly();, in this instances where it tries to use the latter it throws an error stating there is no transaction present. 2) I've added breakpoints to where @Transactional is instantiated within Spring and none of them get hit.

EDIT: So people are asking for reproducible examples of code. The problem doesn't lie within the business logic code, I'm looking for clarity on the usage of the annotation within a Spring 2 controller. So what I have for example is this:

public class ImportController extends SimpleFormController {

    @Override
    @Transactional(rollbackFor = Exception.class)
    public ModelAndView onSubmit(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, Object command, BindException errors) throws Exception {
    ...
    }
}

Answer 1

You are right. @Transactional will not work here because onSubmit is invoked by the same bean.

And in this case the call is done directly and the default spring transaction handling does not work.

See answers in this question for a detailed explanation of the options you have