Session.commitTransaction()

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Definition

Behavior
Example

Definition

Session.commitTransaction(): Saves the changes made by the operations in the multi-document transaction and ends the transaction.
Important
mongosh Method
This page documents a mongosh method. This is not the documentation for database commands or language-specific drivers, such as Node.js.
For the database command, see the commitTransaction command.
For MongoDB API drivers, refer to the language-specific MongoDB driver documentation.
Changed in version 4.2: Starting in MongoDB 4.2, multi-document transactions are available for both sharded clusters and replica sets.

Behavior

Write Concern

When commiting the transaction, the session uses the write concern specified at the transaction start. See Session.startTransaction().

If you commit using "w: 1" write concern, your transaction can be rolled back during the failover process.

Atomicity

When a transaction commits, all data changes made in the transaction are saved and visible outside the transaction. That is, a transaction will not commit some of its changes while rolling back others.

Until a transaction commits, the data changes made in the transaction are not visible outside the transaction.

However, when a transaction writes to multiple shards, not all outside read operations need to wait for the result of the committed transaction to be visible across the shards. For example, if a transaction is committed and write 1 is visible on shard A but write 2 is not yet visible on shard B, an outside read at read concern "local" can read the results of write 1 without seeing write 2.

Retryable

If the commit operation encounters an error, MongoDB drivers retry the commit operation a single time regardless of whether retryWrites is set to false. For more information, see Transaction Error Handling.

Example

Consider a scenario where as changes are made to an employee's record in the hr database, you want to ensure that the events collection in the reporting database are in sync with the hr changes. That is, you want to ensure that these writes are done as a single transaction, such that either both operations succeed or fail.

The employees collection in the hr database has the following documents:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af0776263426f87dd69319a"), "employee" : 3, "name" : { "title" : "Mr.", "name" : "Iba Ochs" }, "status" : "Active", "department" : "ABC" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af0776263426f87dd693198"), "employee" : 1, "name" : { "title" : "Miss", "name" : "Ann Thrope" }, "status" : "Active", "department" : "ABC" }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af0776263426f87dd693199"), "employee" : 2, "name" : { "title" : "Mrs.", "name" : "Eppie Delta" }, "status" : "Active", "department" : "XYZ" }

The events collection in the reporting database has the following documents:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af07daa051d92f02462644a"), "employee" : 1, "status" : { "new" : "Active", "old" : null }, "department" : { "new" : "ABC", "old" : null } }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af07daa051d92f02462644b"), "employee" : 2, "status" : { "new" : "Active", "old" : null }, "department" : { "new" : "XYZ", "old" : null } }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5af07daa051d92f02462644c"), "employee" : 3, "status" : { "new" : "Active", "old" : null }, "department" : { "new" : "ABC", "old" : null } }

The following example opens a transaction, updates an employee's status to Inactive in the employees status and inserts a corresponding document to the events collection, and commits the two operations as a single transaction.

// Runs the txnFunc and retries if TransientTransactionError encountered
function runTransactionWithRetry(txnFunc, session) {
    while (true) {
        try {
            txnFunc(session);  // performs transaction
            break;
        } catch (error) {
            // If transient error, retry the whole transaction
            if (error?.errorLabels?.includes("TransientTransactionError")  ) {
                print("TransientTransactionError, retrying transaction ...");
                continue;
            } else {
                throw error;
            }
        }
    }
}
// Retries commit if UnknownTransactionCommitResult encountered
function commitWithRetry(session) {
    while (true) {
        try {
            session.commitTransaction(); // Uses write concern set at transaction start.
            print("Transaction committed.");
            break;
        } catch (error) {
            // Can retry commit
            if (error?.errorLabels?.includes("UnknownTransactionCommitResult") ) {
                print("UnknownTransactionCommitResult, retrying commit operation ...");
                continue;
            } else {
                print("Error during commit ...");
                throw error;
            }
       }
    }
}
// Updates two collections in a transactions
function updateEmployeeInfo(session) {
    employeesCollection = session.getDatabase("hr").employees;
    eventsCollection = session.getDatabase("reporting").events;
    session.startTransaction( { readConcern: { level: "snapshot" }, writeConcern: { w: "majority" } } );
    try{
        employeesCollection.updateOne( { employee: 3 }, { $set: { status: "Inactive" } } );
        eventsCollection.insertOne( { employee: 3, status: { new: "Inactive", old: "Active" } } );
    } catch (error) {
        print("Caught exception during transaction, aborting.");
        session.abortTransaction();
        throw error;
    }
    commitWithRetry(session);
}
// Start a session.
session = db.getMongo().startSession( { readPreference: { mode: "primary" } } );
try{
   runTransactionWithRetry(updateEmployeeInfo, session);
} catch (error) {
   // Do something with error
} finally {
   session.endSession();
}