EjbTimeout() and transactions

Question

Hello all-
First time poster here, long question, please be gentle....
We are running a weblogic 10.0 MP1 install here, and our application employs the EJB3 timer service to schedule processing.
What we need to happen is for the ejbTimeout() method to be called periodically (this is working fine) but not start a transaction when it is invoked. (this is not)
The processing that our ejbTimeout() method does can be very time consuming (talking to external, 3rd party services) so we do not want a weblogic transaction active while this is taking place. If a transaction is active, it will frequently time out. The idea is that the ejbTimeout() invoke other stateless session bean method(s) that begin a transaction to record the results of the conversation after the long delay is done.
(Note that I am aware that I could increase the allowable timeout for transactions, but this seems like a poor solution, correct me if I am wrong)
I have the ejbTimeout() method annotated as TransactionAttributeType.NOT_SUPPORTED. What I would expect to see is that because of this, the ejbTimeout method can linger as long as it wants before calling a TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW method to start a transaction to record the results. However I see errors like:
javax.ejb.EJBTransactionRolledbackException: EJB Exception: : javax.transaction.TransactionRolledbackException: EJB Exception: : weblogic.transaction.internal.TimedOutException: Transaction timed out after 31 seconds
<many lines omitted>
at com.......RetrieveEmailBusiness.retrieveEmail(RetrieveEmailBusiness.java:82)
at com......EmailRetrievalSchedulerBean.ejbTimeout(EmailRetrievalSchedulerBean.java:96)
Suggesting that there WAS a transaction active while ejbTimeout() was running. How can I prevent ejbTimeout() from being called in the context of a transaction? Do I not understand something about the semantics of NOT_SUPPORTED?
Another side question: The documentation I have says that a NOT_SUPPORTED method when called will "suspend" any transaction that is active for the calling method, and not participate in it. By suspend, does that include stopping the clock? In other words, if the transaction timeout is 30 seconds, and the calling method is 5 seconds into the transaction when it calls the NOT_SUPPORTED method, and that method takes 26 seconds to run, will that cause the outer transaction to roll back when the calling method exits?
Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

At the moment (Production 1.0.4.3 and Beta 9.0.0.0.0) the XSQL action handler implementation for <xsql:insert-request> does an explicit commit.
I've filed a bug (#1727863) to get a similar commit="yes|no" attribute added to the <xsql:insert-request>, just like there is now one supported on <xsql:dml>
In the interim, you'd need to write a custom action handler that uses the XML SQL Utility's OracleXMLSave class to have the behavior you want.