diff doc/manual.tex @ 2000:bddee3af70c4

Tweaking uw_commit() logic, partly to fix a resource clean-up bug on SQL serialization failures
author Adam Chlipala <adam@chlipala.net>
date Tue, 15 Apr 2014 19:12:49 -0400
parents 582ea3a4d622
children 16f5f136a807
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--- a/doc/manual.tex	Mon Feb 24 09:10:31 2014 +0000
+++ b/doc/manual.tex	Tue Apr 15 19:12:49 2014 -0400
@@ -2464,7 +2464,7 @@
   \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.