Unit of Work in WCF - wcf

currently I have some implementation of transactional UoW (TransactionScope + NH) working as WebApi 2 action filter but I'm preparing to do the same on WCF service level.
I need some requirements on properly implemented Uow in WCF:
it needs to be transparent, this means that that i don't want to injected IUnitOfWork implementation anywhere except logic that starts uow and commits / rollbacks uow.
Like in webapi uow management has to be done before WCF service method call and after it was called and probably react to exception during call
What's the best way to prepare something like action filter in WCF infrastructure?
my WCF service logic expects only injections of IRepositories (which internally have ISession) and no uow stuff. This way my code will be clean.
Architecture assumes that client (MVC app) starts distributed transaction and this transaction flows to WCF service which also enlists in current opened transaction.
Are there any caveats?

Related

MVC Controllers WCF Service

I am using ASP.net MVC3 for my presentation layer and my data access and business logic are exposed through a WCF Service. Should my controllers call the WCF service or should there be a further level of abstraction such as a repository which calls the WCF service.
Repository which calls the service
public ProductController(IProductRepository productRepository)
{
_productRepository = productRepository;
}
public ProductRepository(ProductServiceClient client)
{
_client = client;
}
Service directly in the controllers
public ProductController(ProductServiceClient client)
{
_client = client;
}
The repository classes do nothing apart from call the methods exposed via the service.
Sorry I am well confused about your question, but I am sorry if I have misunderstood. Hope my pointers will clear this up.
Repositories related to persistence and define a way to handle the
infrastructure layer i.e. dealing with data (in memory repository,
sql repository or generic one)
Services if you like use these repositories to perform the
contractual operations such as getting the client in your case.
Services are called by clients or someone that requests services and
service in turn calls the repository which in turn calls the data
operations.
So you may need to change your wcf to work with repositories and let your controller call services..hope that helps
I would start by doing the exact oposite - the WCF should call methods inside the repository.
The data layer should be universal, and should be able to be accessed through any means (wcf should be one, mvc website should be another, etc).
That way you can also unit test your projects, and it's easier to keep track of it. Wcf should be considered as an extra api to your program in this case.
I am more concerned of where the business rules should be stored, but I would vote for mvc controllers for business logic, and wcf services invoking those internally.

How can I get Entity Framework and WCF to work with transactions? Okay...what's the secret?

I've been trying several different ways in order to get a simple set of transactions to work for a simple WCF client/server situation. My WCF server has a class level declaration of the Entity Framework class for my database access and several methods to modify data and a method to SaveChanges. I'm using the Oracle Data Access (ODP.NET).
For instance I want to call a modification from the client and then a separate call to save the changes in the WCF service. It doesn't work. Basically, everything executes fine, but when the second call to save the changes is made, the WCF service no longer has the original context and therefore no changes are saved (and, consequently, the previous call that made the changes was automatically rolled back).
I'm utilizing Transaction scope around both operations in my client and executing Complete() after done. My WCF services have OperationContract's that use [TransactionFlow(TransactionFlowOption.Mandatory)] and those method implementations use [OperationBehavior(TransactionScopeRequired = true, TransactionAutoComplete = true)]. Finally, my web config is configured with a wsHttpBinding that has the transactionFlow property set to True.
I'm having no luck. No matter what I try, when I try hitting the service for the follow-up save, the EF context is already renewed.
This has nothing to do with transaction. Transaction works on transactional resource but without calling SaveChanges in the first request there was no transactional resource active because EF context is not part of the transaction - the database is and the database is affected only when you call SaveChanges. To make this work you don't need distributed transactions. You need session-full service and store the EF context in the service instance. It a client uses the same client proxy instance to communicate with the service for all requests the communication will be handled by the same service instance = same EF context instance which will remember changes from previous calls.
IMHO this is very bad architecture. Simply don't use it. Expose specialized methods on WCF service which will do changes and save them. If you need to execute these methods in transaction with other transactional resources use the real distributed transaction.
this might be a reason. Since your are making an update in the different context. context doesn't know that the object is update to have say the context that the object is modified and then you call savechnages(). See if it helps

nHibernate + wcf + Isession

I have a c# solution with 3 projects - Data, WCF and UI. The first one is a class library that talks to db. It's exposed via the second one, which is of type WCF Service Library - the reason for that is it will be exposed in third project - Asp.net app called UI - as a simple svc pointing to dll.
Just to point it out, I'm not using Repository pattern.
I need to have ISession for a WCF call (similiar to Session-per-request approach for asp.net). Can anyone share a solution that simply works? I don't want to use any IOC for that.
Use WcfOperationSessionContext (new in 3.0).
Once bound, your Data classes just have to use SessionFactory.GetCurrentSession().
Each call to service is associated with unique OperationContext. OperationContext doesn't have any store for custom objects but you can implement extension. By setting session in MessageInspector you can initiate NHibernate Session per call in centralized place and access your extended context in any operation.

Castle Windsor Interceptor and Unit Of Work

Is Castle Windsor's Inteceptor mechanism considered to be a good/effective way of implementing the Unit of Work pattern?
My project involves Castle Windsor, the NHibernate Facility and of course NHibernate - all used in self-hosted WCF services.
Each service method normally requests from the Windsor container an instance of a helper class into which the WCF call is delegated. The helper class has an ISessionManager constructor argument which Windsor resolves via the NHibernate Facility.
The trouble is, the helper class is doing too much work. It has both logic and data access intermingled which means its difficult (virtually impossible) to test and difficult to read.
What I want is to re-arrange responsibilities
I don't want the WCF helper to know anything about transactions or sessions, so no ISessionManager constructor arg, no references to transactions and no ISession.
In order for the WCF helper to do data access, its going to have to rely on a new helper, dare I call it a DAO? or God forbid a repository, on which will be methods for fetching, querying, and possibly saving domain objects.
The problem with returning NHibernate proxied objects from a DAO is that if the session is closed before the entity is returned, any subsequent attempt to access collections on the domain object from the client code will result in an exception as the session is no longer there to be used to lazily fetch the required data. It's obvious really, but everyone new to NHibernate must hit this issue.
So if DAOs and Repos cant close the session, what does?
What I need is one NHibernate session per WCF service operation call, where several DAOs or Respositories can call OpenSession as much as they like, but they all get the same session, and ideally, any attempt to dispose the session would be ignored unless its the last Dispose. Not sure about the last bit, but maybe DAOs and repos just call ISessionManager.OpenSession and leave it to something else to flush and dispose the session.
I thought maybe I could use an interceptor which takes an ISessionManager, opens a session and starts a transaction, forwards the invocation, then if no exception occurs, commits the transaction and disposes the session, otherwise rolls back the transaction if any exception occurs.
Any thoughts?
So if DAOs and Repos cant close the
session, what does?session, what does?
Services own units of work, not DAOs. They demark units of work.
Spring manages transactions using AOP, so interceptors sound like a good bet for transaction management to me.
As far as sessions go, those are UI concepts, so it ought to be the web or desktop UI controller that opens the session, marshals services to fulfill use cases, and closes the session when it's complete.
Castle.Service.Transactions also ties well together with the rest of the castle stack and allow you to use AOP to handle transactions.
Have a look at v3!
https://github.com/haf/Castle.Services.Transaction
And the wiki there!
I also created a new NHibernate Facility:
https://github.com/haf/Castle.Facilities.NHibernate/wiki/NHibernate-Facility---Quick-Start

NHibernate Transactions in Open View per Session - suggested practices?

Cleaning up some transactional logic and wondered how other people were handling it.
Ayende's recommendation seems to be to handle transactions at the service boundary. This is a ASP.NET web app though, so it hasn't got a clear cut service boundary, at least not right now.
What do people do?
Create a single transaction per request in a HttpModule and handle commit on EndRequest, rollback on Error?
Create transactions in the actual "services" in the application and handle it multiple places?
Something else?
You can use a IoC Container for your service layer and the container can manage the transaction and the Nibenrate Session.
Your WebApp Controller => call (A) Service Layer => call (B) one or several DAO methods /operations.
The IoC container like Spring.NET will manage te TX scope, by example at (A) and will provide a Session to your DAO in (B). The commit (or rollback) will be handled at the end of the service layer call.
Most people use a session-per-request strategy as stated in your first bullet point. However, I don't believe that the transaction needs to be committed on EndRequest. In many web pages it would be easier to commit the transaction based on user action (e.g. clicking submit) and let EndRequest just handle disposing the ISession.
As far as I can tell, there's no need to create an HttpModule as the same functionality can be created in global.asax: http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=993041.