Afterrollback

Afterrollback is a term used in software development to describe a callback or hook that executes after a database or business transaction has been rolled back. The concept appears in frameworks that support transactional callbacks, and its primary purpose is to handle cleanup, compensation, or notification when a transaction fails to commit.

In Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord provides an after_rollback callback that is triggered when a transaction is rolled back as part of a create, update, or destroy operation. The callback runs only on rollback, not on a successful commit, and can be defined on models to perform actions such as releasing resources, deleting temporary data created during the transaction, or signaling other systems about the failure.

Practical considerations include ensuring that afterrollback code is idempotent and aware of the rollback context, since the same rollback may occur along different execution paths. In nested transactions, the exact condition under which after_rollback runs depends on the framework’s transaction management; developers should consult documentation for behavior with savepoints and nested blocks. When possible, afterrollback should complement after_commit to cover both success and failure paths.

See also: transaction, after_commit, rollback, nested transactions.