Grails (2.3) #Transactional does not rollback - grails

Question

Rollback is done here as expected:
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
def test1() {
def dummy = new Dummy(name: "test1")
dummy.save()
throw new RuntimeException("test1!")
}
But here not - which is probably wrong - try/catch should not affect the behavior:
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
def test2() {
def dummy = new Dummy(name: "test2")
dummy.save()
try {
throw new RuntimeException("test2!")
} catch (all) {
println all.message
}
}

Answer 1

By default, #Transactional wraps the method such that any non-checked exception (viz., a RuntimeException) will cause the transaction to be rolled back.
If you catch/handle the exception within the method, of course, the exception doesn't propagate up to the transactional wrapper and the transaction won't be marked as rollback-only. This appears to be what you're doing.
It's worth pointing out that you can indicate that the transactional wrapper should rollback transactions if other Exceptions are thrown (and propagate to the wrapper). You can do this with the rollbackFor annotation parameter.
For example,
#Transactional(rollbackFor=Throwable.class)
void doTransactionalWork() throws MyException { ... }
will cause the transaction to be rolled back if any Throwable propagates up to the wrapper, even those that are checked (viz., MyException)
This should be the behavior of any #Transactional method, regardless of whether you're creating a new transaction or inheriting an existing transactional context.

Answer 2

maybe you have misunderstood the purpose of try catch or maybe you are just having a wobbly moment:
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
def test2() {
//you may be doing other stuff here
//but now about to do some transaction work
//so lets wrap this method around a try catch
try {
//this is happening
def dummy = new Dummy(name: "test2")
dummy.save()
} catch (Exception all) { // or catch (Throwable all) {
// if something went wrong in above save method
//should be caught and runtime exception means roll back
throw new RuntimeException("test2!" +all?.toString())
}
}
I hope it explains where you went wrong but really you wish to do all of this in a service and do the try catch part in the controller -
so you do you transaction work and if things go wrong you may wish to throw additional exceptions from the service that the try catch in the controller would capture and set it to roll back.
I did a sample project years back here hope it helps
eitherway those are someone's experiments and aren't really the way you would go about doing proper coding, I mean it is a rather odd unusual way of doing things and in short he is just trying to make it throw a runtime exception therefore triggering roll back. I stick with my suggestion in the answer that you want to do a one off try catch in the controller. That attempts to capture both validation errors of the object at hand as well as failures within the failure of any given service transactional work. Something like this but probably a lot more work to capture all specific issues and return back to originating page with the underlying issues - having also now rolled back transaction.