[Zope-dev] [Bug] Zope's transaction behaviour flawed

[Dieter Maurer]

Zope's current transaction behaviour is essentially:


  ## request starts
  transaction.begin()
  try:
       object= REQUEST.traverse(...)
       mapply(object,...)
       transaction.commit()
  except:
       transaction.abort()
       handle_error()
  ## request ends


This is flawed as error handling is done outside of a transaction.

   Potential changes during the error handling spill over
   uncontrolled into another request and are there
   either committed or aborted as part of this request.

   Andrew Athan (<mailto:aathan@memeplex.com>) has had lots
   of serious inconsistencies in Zope's session data.
   After extensive analysis, he found out that reading
   the session data during error handling led to these
   error conditions (reading session data causes writes to
   the administrative data).


I suggest, we let Zope perform error handling in its own
transaction after the original transaction had been aborted.
When error handling succeeds, its transaction is committed,
otherwise aborted.

The new behaviour would look something like this:

  ## request starts
  transaction.begin()
  try:
       object= REQUEST.traverse(...)
       mapply(object,...)
       transaction.commit()
  except:
       transaction.abort()
       transaction.begin()
       transaction.note('%s (application error handling)'
                        % '/'.join(object.getPhysicalPath)
			)
       try:
	   handle_error()
	   transaction.commit()
       except:
           default_handle_error() # Zope's default error handling
	                          # it should not have side effects
				  # and is executed inside the
				  # error handling transaction
	   transaction.abort()
  ## request ends
  



Dieter