grails install-plugin transactional-controller

or add the following plugin dependency in BuildConfig.groovy of your project:

plugins {
  runtime 'org.grails.plugins:transactional-controller:0.1'
}

The source code available at http://github.com/pedjak/grails-transactional-controller

Why

Many examples demonstrate how to add/update instances of domain classes within a controller's action, but you should understand that this could leave the database in an inconsistent state, if an exception occurs. Consider the following example:

class Controller {
      def update = {
        new A(value:params.valueA).save(validate:true, flush:true)
        new B(value:params.valueB).save(validate:true, flush:true)
      }
    }

Imagine now that an instance of B is not valid for some provided values. Save rises the exception, but saving of A will not be rolled back. These are the situations where the plugin is useful.

How

• assigning a closure to controller.actions.transactional property in Config.groovy.

controller.actions.transactional = { cc ->
	  cc.name == "Foo" ? true : false
    }

The above statement specifies that the actions of FooController only should be made transactional. Configuring via the application config is useful when we need to tweak controllers that are part of some plugins we use.

A statement like controller.actions.transactional = { true } is valid, but not recommended, because it would significantly impact the application performances. In general, only actions that might leave the database in an inconsistent state should be made transactional.

• adding the following static field in the controller and setting

static transactional = true

By setting the field's value to 'false', controller's actions will be not executed within transactions (default Grails behavior anyway).

The field can accept as well a list of strings representing names of actions that should be transactional:

class SampleController {
      static transactional = ["add", "update"]
      def add = { }
      def update = { }
      def get = { }
    }

Similar to withTransaction method, transactional actions can query and edit the status of the transaction at runtime by accessing an additional injected request.txstatus property (an instance of Spring's TransactionStatus)