The final answer

This post is part 8 in a 9-part series on Envers, Spring, and JTA. The next post is Blowing up in test mode, and the previous post is An answer.

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The story thus far:

The envers beforeCompletion() hook was not running when I switched from using Spring’s HibernateTransactionManager to using its JtaTransactionManager.  I had done some digging on my own, then made a long post to the Spring Data Access forum (after an initial post to the envers forum).

The long post apparently scared everybody off ;) , so I wrote a much shorter, more focused post.

A reply to the shorter post pointed me to the SessionFactoryUtils javadoc, where I read:

Note that for non-Spring JTA transactions, a JTA TransactionManagerLookup has to be specified in the Hibernate configuration.

On the trail of how to specify a TransactionManagerLookup, I found the hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class setting in the Using JTA section of the Hibernate Reference Guide — but unbeknownst to me, another setting was needed…

Final Answer

A Hibernate Users forum post titled How can i use JTA with Hibernate? points to the Transaction demarcation with JTA section of the Sessions and transactions Wiki page, where we see:

• set hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class to a lookup strategy for your JEE container
• set hibernate.transaction.factory_class to org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory

So, adding these two lines to my Hibernate spring beans file (lines 6 and 7 below) fixed the issue:

<bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean">
		...
<property name="hibernateProperties">
<props>
				...
<prop key="hibernate.transaction.manager_lookup_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JBossTransactionManagerLookup</prop>
<prop key="hibernate.transaction.factory_class">org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory</prop>
			</props>
		</property>
		...
    </bean>

NOW the envers beforeCompletion() hook gets called when using the JTA transaction manager.

Whew!