1 /**
2  * Copyright (C) 2010 Google, Inc.
3  *
4  * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
5  * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
6  * You may obtain a copy of the License at
7  *
8  * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
9  *
10  * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
11  * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
12  * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
13  * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
14  * limitations under the License.
15  */
16 
17 package com.google.inject.persist;
18 
19 /**
20  * This interface is used to gain manual control over the unit of work. This is mostly to do
21  * work in non-request, non-transactional threads. Or where more fine-grained control over the unit
22  * of work is required. Starting and ending a unit of work directly corresponds to opening and
23  * closing a {@code Session}, {@code EntityManager} or {@code ObjectContainer} respectively.
24  * <p> The
25  * Unit of Work referred to by UnitOfWork will always be local to the calling thread. Be careful to
26  * end() in a finally block. Neither JPA, nor Hibernate supports threadsafe sessions (reasoning
27  * behind thread-locality of Unit of Work semantics).
28  *
29  * <ul>
30  *   <li>Using UnitOfWork with the PersistFilter inside a request is not recommended.</li>
31  *   <li>Using UnitOfWork with session-per-txn strategy is not terribly clever either.</li>
32  *   <li>Using UnitOfWork with session-per-request strategy but *outside* a request (i.e. in a
33  *       background or bootstrap thread) is probably a good use case.</li>
34  *  </ul>
35  *
36  * @author Dhanji R. Prasanna (dhanji@gmail com)
37  */
38 public interface UnitOfWork {
39 
40   /**
41    * Starts a Unit Of Work. Underneath, causes a session to the data layer to be opened. If there
42    * is already one open, the invocation will do nothing. In this way, you can define arbitrary
43    * units-of-work that nest within one another safely.
44    *
45    * Transaction semantics are not affected.
46    */
begin()47   void begin();
48 
49   /**
50    * Declares an end to the current Unit of Work. Underneath, causes any open session to the data
51    * layer to close. If there is no Unit of work open, then the call returns silently. You can
52    * safely invoke end() repeatedly.
53    * <p>
54    * Transaction semantics are not affected.
55    */
end()56   void end();
57 }
58