@Transactional not always works on methods

Although I had annoted my method as @Transactional no transaction was started. Situation was the following:

applicationContext.xml

...
<!-- Enable @Transactional support -->
<tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager" />
...

Test.java

class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
        ...
        Test test = factory.getBean("test");
        test.run();
    }

    public void run() {
        // code before transaction
        runTransactional();
        // code after transaction
    }

    @Transactional
    public void runTransactional() {
        // code in transaction
    }
}

I found the reason in a little hint in the Spring Documenation (Using @Transactional):

Note: In proxy mode (which is the default), only ‘external’ method calls coming in through the proxy will be intercepted. This means that ‘self-invocation’, i.e. a method within the target object calling some other method of the target object, won’t lead to an actual transaction at runtime even if the invoked method is marked with @Transactional!

So the solution is either to use aspectj instead of proxy-mode or to make an ‘external’ method call. I used the second. So I head to move the code from run() to main() so that I have an ‘external’ method call to runTransactional().

Test.java

class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
        ...
        Test test = factory.getBean("test");
        // code before transaction
        test.runTransactional();
        // code after transaction
    }

    @Transactional
    public void runTransactional() {
        // code in transaction
    }
}