Spring - No EntityManager with actual transaction available for current thread - cannot reliably process 'persist' call

I had the same problem and I annotated the method as @Transactional and it worked.

UPDATE: checking the spring documentation it looks like by default the PersistenceContext is of type Transaction, so that's why the method has to be transactional (http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/orm.html):

The @PersistenceContext annotation has an optional attribute type, which defaults to PersistenceContextType.TRANSACTION. This default is what you need to receive a shared EntityManager proxy. The alternative, PersistenceContextType.EXTENDED, is a completely different affair: This results in a so-called extended EntityManager, which is not thread-safe and hence must not be used in a concurrently accessed component such as a Spring-managed singleton bean. Extended EntityManagers are only supposed to be used in stateful components that, for example, reside in a session, with the lifecycle of the EntityManager not tied to a current transaction but rather being completely up to the application.

I got this exception while attempting to use a deleteBy custom method in the spring data repository. The operation was attempted from a JUnit test class.

The exception does not occur upon using the @Transactional annotation at the JUnit class level.

This error had me foxed for three days, the situation I faced produced the same error. Following all the advice I could find, I played with the configuration but to no avail.

Eventually I found it, the difference, the Service I was executing was contained in a common jar, the issue turned out to be AspectJ not treating the Service instantiation the same. In effect the proxy was simply calling the underlying method without all the normal Spring magic being executed before the method call.

In the end the @Scope annotation placed on the service as per the example solved the issue:

@Service
@Scope(proxyMode = ScopedProxyMode.INTERFACES)
@Transactional
public class CoreServiceImpl implements CoreService {
    @PersistenceContext
    protected EntityManager entityManager;

    @Override
    public final <T extends AbstractEntity> int deleteAll(Class<T> clazz) {
        CriteriaDelete<T> criteriaDelete = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder().createCriteriaDelete(clazz);
        criteriaDelete.from(clazz);
        return entityManager.createQuery(criteriaDelete).executeUpdate();
    }

}

The method I have posted is a delete method but the annotations affect all persistence methods in the same way.

I hope this post helps someone else who has struggled with the same issue when loading a service from a jar