What causes "There is no open transaction to rollback" in SeaQL/sea-orm?

Only issue ROLLBACK after a successful BEGIN; pair them in the same code path.

There is no open transaction to rollback

Error message

There is no open transaction to rollback

What it means

Mirror of the commit panic: the mock database panics in `rollback` when there is no open transaction (`self.transaction` is `None`). A ROLLBACK without a prior BEGIN, or a second rollback after the transaction already ended, violates the mock's transaction protocol.

Source

Thrown at src/database/mock.rs:210

                        self.transaction_log.push(transaction.into_transaction());
                    }
                }
            }
            None => panic!("There is no open transaction to commit"),
        }
    }

    #[instrument(level = "trace")]
    fn rollback(&mut self) {
        match self.transaction.as_mut() {
            Some(transaction) => {
                if transaction.rollback(self.db_backend) {
                    if let Some(transaction) = self.transaction.take() {
                        self.transaction_log.push(transaction.into_transaction());
                    }
                }
            }
            None => panic!("There is no open transaction to rollback"),
        }
    }

    fn drain_transaction_log(&mut self) -> Vec<Transaction> {
        std::mem::take(&mut self.transaction_log)
    }

    fn get_database_backend(&self) -> DbBackend {
        self.db_backend
    }

    fn ping(&self) -> Result<(), DbErr> {
        Ok(())
    }
}

impl MockRow {
    /// Get a value from the [MockRow]

View on GitHub (pinned to e29bcd1b41)

Solutions

Only issue ROLLBACK after a successful BEGIN; pair them in the same code path.
Make cleanup idempotent: track whether a transaction is open before rolling back.
Fix double-rollback in error handlers (e.g. rollback in both inner and outer error paths).
Reorder the mock test script so begin precedes rollback.

Example fix

// before
if err {
    rollback(stmt) // panics if begin never ran
}

// after
begin(stmt);
if err {
    rollback(stmt); // matched pair
}

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

// only rollback when a transaction is open
if tx_open {
    rollback(stmt);
    tx_open = false;
}

Type guard

fn can_rollback(mock: &MockDatabase) -> bool {
    mock.transaction_depth() > 0
}

Try / catch

std::panic::catch_unwind(|| mock.rollback()) // prefer fixing the script over catching

Prevention

Track transaction state explicitly and only rollback when open.
Avoid rolling back in multiple nested error handlers.
Use RAII guards that rollback at most once.
Keep mock scripts linear and pair every BEGIN with exactly one terminator.

When it happens

Trigger: Executing `ROLLBACK` on a `MockDatabase` with no active transaction — no `begin` was issued, or the transaction was already committed or rolled back.

Common situations: Error-handling paths in tests that always call rollback even when begin never ran; a catch/cleanup handler rolling back twice; test scripts with unmatched BEGIN/ROLLBACK pairs.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid state transition" errors: "status must be X, actually Y", "already rejected/charging/uninstalled", "cannot ... while running" — what they mean when a library rejects your call — this error's family across 31 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of SeaQL/sea-orm@e29bcd1b41 (2026-09-10). Data as JSON: /api/errors/bd2bb954a9f4a093. Report an issue: GitHub.