Spring Boot Declarative vs Programmatic Transactions

Declarative Transaction

Concept

Implemented through @Transactional annotation, automatically managed by Spring AOP.

Usage

@Service
@Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRED,
               isolation = Isolation.DEFAULT,
               rollbackFor = Exception.class)
public class TestServiceImpl implements TestService {
    // All methods inherit transaction configuration
}

Advantages

• Non-invasive design, business code decoupled from transaction management
• Simple configuration, easy to maintain
• Reduces duplicate code

Disadvantages

• Relatively difficult to debug (transaction boundary is not obvious)
• Strict requirements for exception handling (by default only rolls back RuntimeException)

Programmatic Transaction

Concept

Developers manually write code to manage transactions, implemented through TransactionTemplate or PlatformTransactionManager.

Implementation

@Service
@RequiredArgsConstructor
public class TestServiceImpl implements TestService {
    private final TransactionTemplate transactionTemplate;

    public String test01() {
        transactionTemplate.execute(new TransactionCallbackWithoutResult() {
            @Override
            protected void doInTransactionWithoutResult(TransactionStatus status) {
                try {
                    // Business logic
                    unitInfoMapper.insertUnitInfo(unitInfo);
                } catch (Exception e) {
                    status.setRollbackOnly();  // Manually mark rollback
                }
            }
        });
        return "ok";
    }
}

Advantages

• Finer control granularity, high flexibility
• Can precisely control transaction boundaries
• More intuitive debugging

Disadvantages

• High code invasiveness
• Requires writing a lot of template code

Comparison

Feature	Declarative Transaction	Programmatic Transaction
Implementation	Based on AOP	TransactionTemplate API
Control Granularity	Relatively coarse	Fine
Code Invasiveness	Low	High

Usage Recommendations:

• Declarative transaction: Suitable for most conventional business scenarios
• Programmatic transaction: Suitable for scenarios requiring fine-grained control of transaction boundaries and complex exception handling