TransactionRequiredException Executing an update/delete query

I am not sure if this will help your situation (that is if it stills exists), however, after scouring the web for a similar issue.

I was creating a native query from a persistence EntityManager to perform an update.

Query query = entityManager.createNativeQuery(queryString);

I was receiving the following error:

caused by: javax.persistence.TransactionRequiredException: Executing an update/delete query

Many solutions suggest adding @Transactional to your method. Just doing this did not change the error.

Some solutions suggest asking the EntityManager for a EntityTransaction so that you can call begin and commit yourself. This throws another error:

caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Not allowed to create transaction on shared EntityManager - use Spring transactions or EJB CMT instead

I then tried a method which most sites say is for use application managed entity managers and not container managed (which I believe Spring is) and that was joinTransaction().

Having @Transactional decorating the method and then calling joinTransaction() on EntityManager object just prior to calling query.executeUpdate() and my native query update worked.

I hope this helps someone else experiencing this issue.


In my case, I had the wrong @Transactional imported.

The correct one is:

import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional;

and not

import javax.transaction.Transactional;

I have also faced same issue when I work with Hibernate and Spring Jpa Data Repository. I forgot to place @Transactional on spring data repository method.

Its working for me after annotating with @Transactional.