I've also had the need for determining the state of a transaction. Previously, I'd defined a local WITH-TRANSACTION macro that bound a special variable *TRANSACTION* with the transaction in progress. I have attached a patch that does just that. WITHIN-TRANSACTION-P will return T if a transaction is open. I've not exported *TRANSACTION* because I'm unsure whether this should be part of the public interface. I'm yet to come up with a less hands-on approach to nested transactions, but this allows options for experiments outside of the postmodern proper. For example, my ENSURE-TRANSACTION macro. Really, I should be using savepoints, but this allows me some more flexibility in how I layer my database access methods. I'm not sure if this is appropriate, but if you think it is useful enough, I can prepare a patch to include this as well. (defmacro ensure-transaction ((&optional name) &body body) `(flet ((exec-body () (let ,(if name `((,name postmodern::*transaction*))) ,@body))) (if (within-transaction-p) (exec-body) (with-transaction (,name) (exec-body))))) -- Daniel White