Overview of Transactions In TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks a transaction is a logical unit of work. Transactions allow you to group multiple activities into an atomic execution unit. All activities that can participate in a transaction must either complete successfully or be undone or rolled back together. To create a transaction, you use a group to surround the activities in the transaction. Not all TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks activities can participate in a transaction. Only the following types of activities have transactional capabilities: • JDBC activities • JMS activities • ActiveEnterprise Adapter activities that use JMS transports • EJB activities • TIBCO iProcess BusinessWorks Connector activities Although only the activities above can be part of a transaction, any activity can be contained in a transaction group. For example, you may have three JDBC Update activities and one Write File activity in a transaction group. All the JDBC Update activities either complete or roll back at the end of the transaction. The Write File activity, however, does not participate in the transaction and executes whether the transaction commits or fails. For more information about creating groups, see Grouping Activities. Types of Transactions TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks offers a variety of types of transactions that can be used in different situations. You can use the type of transaction that suits the needs of your integration project. When you create a transaction group, you must specify the type of transaction. TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks supports the following types of transactions: • JDBC • Java Transaction API (JTA) UserTransaction • XA Transaction • JMS Local Transaction A transaction group can have only one transaction type. The activities that can participate in the transaction are determined by the transaction type, the configuration of the activity, and the type of the activity. For example, only JDBC activities whose JDBC Connection type is "JDBC" can participate in a JDBC transaction. The following sections describe each of these types of transactions and the situations in which they are used in more detail.
