Why doesn't my GORM object save to the database? - grails

Question

Consider the following code:
if (!serpKeyword) {
serpKeyword = new SerpKeyword(
keyword: searchKeyword,
geoKeyword: geoKeyword,
concatenation: concatenation,
locale: locale
)
serpKeyword.save(flush: true, failOnError: true)
}
serpService.submitKeyword(serpKeyword, false)
Here's the submitKeyword method:
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
boolean submitKeyword(keywordToSubmit, boolean reset) {
def keyword = SerpKeyword.get(keywordToSubmit.id)
No error is raised when I call serpKeyword.save, but when I get into the submitKeyword method, SerpKeyword.get(keywordToSubmit.id) returns null. What could be preventing this from saving?
Edit
Changing REQUIRES_NEW to REQUIRED seems to do the trick. Here's what I think is happening.
The code that calls serpService.submitKeyword is located within a service method. From what I understand, service method's have a default propagation strategy of REQUIRED. Since all this database writes are happening within the context of a transaction, the writes are queued up in the database, but not actually executed against the database until the transaction is completed, according to the docs:
Note that flushing is not the same as committing a transaction. If
your actions are performed in the context of a transaction, flushing
will execute SQL updates but the database will save the changes in its
transaction queue and only finalize the updates when the transaction
commits.
We call serpService.submitKeyword before our transaction is actually finished. That method starts a completely new transaction where our serpKeyword is not available. Changing it to REQUIRED works because we are now operating within the context of our parent transaction.

Answer 1

I think some part of the stack is being lazy. I've ran into this behavior with Hibernate, if that's what you're using. I'm not sure it's an approved maneuver, but you could clear the session before calling submitKeyword like so:
long keywordId = serpKeyword.id
SerpKeyword.withSession{it.clear()}
serpService.submitKeyword(keywordId, false)
And then change the method to:
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW)
boolean submitKeyword(keywordId, boolean reset) {
def keyword = SerpKeyword.get(keywordId)
Then I bet the .get() will work. If you have other objects in the session you need. You will need to lift those out by storing their id's and .get()ing them as well.