Can you set isolation levels of message-driven bean transactions?

Question

The problem: I have 3 different message-driven beans which each get a different type of message, except for a field that is common to all. That field is used as the primary key of an entity object. The message-driven beans configured to use a container managed transaction. Each message-driven bean, in processing the message, first does a lookup by primary key to see if the object associated with the key exists, and if it does not, it requests the entity's home object to create it. After that, they do further processing. The problem is that sometimes all the beans simultaneously get a message, resulting in each bean checking for the entity object at about the same time, and if they fail to find it (because none of them has created it yet), each creates an object, all with the same primary key. This is not caught until the beans start to complete their onMessage method, which I believe results in the container committing the transaction. One of the transactions will be committed successfully, while the other two will fail, get rolled back, and then be retried with the same message. The second time through, the other beans will find the entity object (since it has been created and committed) and they will complete correctly. In the end, they right thing occurs, except that there is a troubling exception or 2 in the log telling about the constraint violation (with the primary key) and the rollback. If it was just me, that would be fine, but our customer does not like to see exceptions in the log; that indicates to him that something is wrong.
So, I am looking for someway to make sure that the actions of the message-driven beans are serialized. One suggestion from a colleague was to set the isolation level of the transactions being used by the container in processing the message-driven beans' onMessage method. However, the documentation does not mention any way to do this for a message-driven bean. Suggestions?
Is the use of a UserTransaction a better way to do this? If I acquire a UserTransaction within the onMessage method of a message-driven bean, can I set its isolation level? How would this work? When I get a UserTransaction, does each client get a different transaction, or do they all get the same one?

Answer 1

(1) The WebLogic JMS "unit-of-order" feature is a heavily adopted feature that was specifically designed to handle similar use cases - see the JMS developer guide for extensive documentation. In your use case, if "key" is used to define UOO, then there's no limit on the number of keys that can be processed concurrently, but messages for any particular key will be processed single-threaded in the order in which they were first submitted.
Note that if you're using distributed destinations, the UOO feature is still fully supported - but the developer and/or administrator needs to decide whether to configure the destination to use "hash" or "path service" based routing (the JMS UOO edoc outlines the trade-offs).
(2) Another alternative is to use a single MDB with max-beans-free-pool that processes all three types (as the other poster suggested). I think this assumes all MDBs run on the same JVM.
(3) Another alternative is to use multiple queues, with a single MDB on each Q. Where some sort of hash algorithm is used to determine which Q is for the key. This approach is a "hand-coded" variant of the approach in (1) with "hash" based routing enabled...
(4) If all MDBs actually do run in the same JVM, a third alternative is to use code the application to use a common lock to protect each key, eg, something like:
// assume MyLock is simply a class with a "reference counter"
// assume some global "staticHM" hash map that is all MDBs can access
onMessage() {
MyLock lock = null;
key= msg.getKey();
synchronized(staticHM) {
lock = staticHM.get();
if (lock = null) {
lock = new lock();
staticHM.put(key, new lock());
lock.incRefCount();
try {
synchronized(lock) {
// only one onMessage will be able to lock a particular key at a time
do your work;
} finally {
synchronized(staticHT) {
if (lock.defRefCount() == 0) staticHM.remove(lock);
if (lock = null) staticHM.put(key);
If multiple threads get a message with the same key, then only one thread at a time will work on the key.
Hope this helps,
Tom