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authorGravatar Adam Chlipala <adam@chlipala.net>2014-04-15 19:12:49 -0400
committerGravatar Adam Chlipala <adam@chlipala.net>2014-04-15 19:12:49 -0400
commit9a7852b68da59f0ffce80148e913145609251e75 (patch)
tree877a82cf3774bb716de357292e2cd2eb8762b99d /doc
parent2238977c391b9de4a4a0705efaf4fcdd6120af9f (diff)
Tweaking uw_commit() logic, partly to fix a resource clean-up bug on SQL serialization failures
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
-rw-r--r--doc/manual.tex2
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/doc/manual.tex b/doc/manual.tex
index e46089d0..98ebaac5 100644
--- a/doc/manual.tex
+++ b/doc/manual.tex
@@ -2464,7 +2464,7 @@ void uw_register_transactional(uw_context, void *data, uw_callback commit,
\end{verbatim}
All side effects in Ur/Web programs need to be compatible with transactions, such that any set of actions can be undone at any time. Thus, you should not perform actions with non-local side effects directly; instead, register handlers to be called when the current transaction is committed or rolled back. The arguments here give an arbitary piece of data to be passed to callbacks, a function to call on commit, a function to call on rollback, and a function to call afterward in either case to clean up any allocated resources. A rollback handler may be called after the associated commit handler has already been called, if some later part of the commit process fails. A free handler is told whether the runtime system expects to retry the current page request after rollback finishes.
- Any of the callbacks may be \texttt{NULL}. To accommodate some stubbornly non-transactional real-world actions like sending an e-mail message, Ur/Web treats \texttt{NULL} \texttt{rollback} callbacks specially. When a transaction commits, all \texttt{commit} actions that have non-\texttt{NULL} rollback actions are tried before any \texttt{commit} actions that have \texttt{NULL} rollback actions. Thus, if a single execution uses only one non-transactional action, and if that action never fails partway through its execution while still causing an observable side effect, then Ur/Web can maintain the transactional abstraction.
+ Any of the callbacks may be \texttt{NULL}. To accommodate some stubbornly non-transactional real-world actions like sending an e-mail message, Ur/Web treats \texttt{NULL} \texttt{rollback} callbacks specially. When a transaction commits, all \texttt{commit} actions that have non-\texttt{NULL} rollback actions are tried before any \texttt{commit} actions that have \texttt{NULL} rollback actions. Furthermore, an SQL \texttt{COMMIT} is also attempted in between the two phases, so the nicely transactional actions have a chance to influence whether data are committed to the database, while \texttt{NULL}-rollback actions only get run in the first place after committing data. The reason for all this is that it is \emph{expected} that concurrency interactions will cause database commits to fail in benign ways that call for transaction restart. A truly non-undoable action should only be run after we are sure the database transaction will commit.
When a request handler ends with multiple pending transactional actions, their handlers are run in a first-in-last-out stack-like order, wherever the order would otherwise be ambiguous.