Spring @Transactional not working

Question

I previously had a post on this issue that was resolved. However since rebuilding the project with auto wired beans and less XML configuration I find I am revisiting this is

Answer 1

The reason that moving the context:component-scan tags to the application context xml fixed the transactional behavior is: <tx:annotation-driven /> is a post-processor that wraps @Transactional annotated bean methods with an AOP method interceptor which handles transactional behavior. Spring post-processors, only operate on the specific application context they are defined in.

In your case, you have defined the <tx:annotation-driven /> post-processor in the application context, while the beans annotated with @Transactional are in the servlet application context. Thus, the <tx:annotation-driven /> post-processor only operated on the application context beans, not the servlet context beans. When the context:component-scan tags were moved to the application context, then the <tx:annotation-driven /> post-processor wrapped their transactional methods appropriately.

Hope that makes some sense.

[Edit]

What is the difference between the Application Context and a Servlet Context?

What is a Spring post-processor and how does it work?

What is AOP in Spring?