My application needs to comunicate with several external WCF services to satisfy requests from client applications. Being itself a WCF service, it must of course be able to process several simultaneous requests. That being, and since I will be acessing more than one service, I thought about grouping clients in the following manner:
public static class ClientManager
{
private static readonly Service1Client _service1Client = new Service1Client();
private static readonly Service2Client _service2Client = new Service2Client();
...
public static Service1Client Service1DefaultClient { get { return _service1Client; } }
public static Service2Client Service2DefaultClient { get { return _service2Client; } }
}
Then, from the remaining of the code, I would only need to execute
ClientManager.Service1DefaultClient.SomeMethod();
ClientManager.Service2DefaultClient.SomeMethod();
...
The idea is to create a central place to better manage WCF clients. However, I don't really know if this design is the most appropriate one for a service which will be issuing several requests at the same time to Service1DefaultClient and Service2DefaultClient. What do you suggest? Creating a more complex client pool with several proxies from each service to choose from?
Having static client proxies doesn't look like a good idea to me.
If ClientBase instance transitions to the Faulted state, it becomes unusable and you have to re-create it.
If you have a stateful service, session lifetime will be the same as lifetime of a client proxy object, which is very long in your case.
Depending on your binding settings, ClientBase may serialize concurrent calls made on the same proxy instance. In your case, this may strongly affect performance.
I just don't see what problem does this solve.
Proxies are relatively lightweight because of the ChannelFactory caching, so I would just create a new instance every time it is needed.
Related
I have a WCF service and I have the following (simplified) class:
public class PerOperationSingleton : IDisposable
{
private static bool _hasInstance = false;
public PerOperationSingleton()
{
if(_hasInstance)
throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot have multiple instances during a single WCF operation");
_hasInstance = true;
}
public void Dispose()
{
_hasInstance = false;
}
}
I guess, it's pretty self explanatory piece of code. I don't need a singleton for entire WCF service but only during a single operation call. If one instance of the PerOperationSingleton is disposed, it should be safe to create a new instance during the same WCF operation.
The problem is that I don't know how to make the _hasInstance variable to be effective only for one WCF operation. I know about [ThreadStatic], but I've heard that ASP.NET and WCF do not guarantee that an operation will be executed on a single thread - it might be transferred to another thread.
I definitely don't want my _hasInstance = true to move to thread pool and get incorrectly detected if some other operation picks that thread from the pool.
If WCF operation moves to another thread, I would like the _hasInstance variable to keep the "true" value if it was set.
And I don't want to change some global settings for my WCF service to avoid affecting the performance or get into some problems which will be hard to debug and solve later (I don't feel proficient enough in advanced ASP.NET and WCF topics).
I cannot store _hasInstance in session either because my client requested to disable .NET sessions for various reasons.
I would like the class PerOperationSingleton actually to be environment agnostic. It shouldn't really know anything about WCF or ASP.NET.
How do I make _hasInstance variable static during entire call of my WCF operation and don't affect other WCF operations?
I would consider using OperationContext to make you data "static" during the operation call.
Here is a similar discussion Where to store data for current WCF call? Is ThreadStatic safe?
I'm in the process of writing a duplex WCF service using NetTcpBinding, and I've run into an architecture question that I think I know the answer to, but hope that I'm wrong.
Our service is stateful, and we've selected NetTcpBinding with PerSession InstanceContextMode. For various reasons, this is something that we require. I'm trying to break up our larger interface (where large blocks of the operations would not apply to many clients) into multiple smaller interfaces with the operations logically grouped. While it's simple enough to have a single service implementation implement all of the contracts, I'm not sure if it's possible to have multiple service contracts share a single channel (or, more to my requirement, a single session), and I'd definitely need to be able to do that in order to make this work.
I could, of course, include everything on one contract and throw FaultExceptions when an invalid operation is performed, but I'd really like to be able to break these up and not even add an endpoint for inapplicable contracts. Is what I'm looking for possible?
TL;DR Version:
I need to be able to do this:
[ServiceContract]
public interface IServiceA
{
[OperationContract]
void Foo();
}
[ServiceContract]
public interface IServiceB
{
[OperationContract]
void Bar();
}
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerSession)]
public class Service : IServiceA, IServiceB
{
...
}
And be able to establish one session from the client to the service but use both IServiceA and IServiceB.
The default instance provider over a sessionful channel will give you an instance per connection in your case. You can however extend the instance provider to pick up an existing object from your own cache and return the same object.
How you correlate instances will be upto you using some special message header etc. The underlying channel/Connection will be different for each proxy and also use differnt buffers / concurrency models but you can allow service model to use the same instance.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163590.aspx
I'm making a WCF service with netTcpBinding which has a main lobby with multiple chatrooms which the clients can enter. The Lobby class implements ILobby as the service contract.
When a client wishes to enter a room I want to callback the client exposing a new Channel containing the InstanceContext for the room he just entered but after much searching I am doubting that this is possible.
For example on the Service side I might have
class Lobby : ILobby
{
Dictionary<string, Chatroom> rooms;
public void JoinRoom(string roomname)
{
if (rooms[roomname].TryEnter()) {}
}
}
class ChatRoom : IChatRoom
{
public bool TryEnter(string username)
{
ILobbyCallback callback =
OperationContext.Current.GetCallbackChannel<ILobbyCallback>();
// How do I do this next bit?
callback.JoinedRoom(pass some instance context here);
return true;
}
}
On the client side callback method I want
public void JoinedRoom(InstanceContext for the room on the service side)
{
// Create a new WCF proxy using above InstanceContext
// Create a WPF UI for the new room passing the proxy so it can communicate
// with the room class directly without going via the root service
}
Is this possible? What's the best practice for spawning new classes with their own contracts on the service side? Or do I just have to bundle everything into one massive MyService class and handle everything myself?
You cannot pass instance context as parameter to any operation contract. It doesn't make sense because that context has local scope. It is called "instance context" = it is context of current service instance. In duplex scenario both client and server has its own service:
Clients calls server's service through its proxy
Server calls client' service through received callback channel
Server's service instance context has meaning only on the server. It is not clear what you are trying to achieve (except very complex architecture).
If you want to share context on client you can try to pass around the instance context used for the very first proxy you created - I'm not sure if it will work but you can try it
If you want to share service instance context between multiple proxies you must develop your own IInstanceContextProvider and perhaps also your own IInstanceProvider (depending on what you want to achieve), wrap them in behavior and add them to the service. That will put whole complexity of session handling and correct instance releasing under your control (it obviously has its pros and cons).
But is it really needed? When I look at your code I see that one service and one proxy is enough. Also your JoinRoom operation doesn't need to use callback at all, it can be just request response method.
I'm currently in the process of writing a WCF REST service with SubSonic SimpleRepository and the WCF REST Contrib library. The service is going to be hosted on IIS 7. The database is going to be MS SQL Server. I could not really find a good example which is using this combination of technologies on the internet. The service should expose a database in a RESTful manner but also contains some business rules (e.g. registering users, saving statistics) so I can't use ADO.net Data Services. Because there are going to be a lot of clients accessing the service at the same time it's important that the service can serve several clients at the same time.
For good performance I want to use the following service behaviour:
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.PerSession, ConcurrencyMode=ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)]
There are no instance variables in the Service class and as I understand it, those attribute values cause new a instance of the service class to be created for every call (not per session because it is called over https).
I used the following simple class for creating the SimpleRepository once (singleton):
public class DB
{
private static SimpleRepository _Repository;
public static SimpleRepository Repository
{
get
{
if (_Repository == null)
{
_Repository = new SimpleRepository("5Drive", SimpleRepositoryOptions.RunMigrations);
}
return _Repository;
}
}
}
Here is an example method of my service:
Interface:
[OperationContract]
[WebGet(UriTemplate = "vehicles")]
[WebDispatchFormatter]
Vehicles GetVehicles();
Implementation:
public Vehicles GetVehicles()
{
// get all vehicles for the logged in user
var vehicles = from v in DB.Repository.All<Vehicle>()
where v.UserID == GetUserID()
orderby v.Name
select v;
return new Vehicles(vehicles);
}
So, here is my question: can I do it this way? Is SimpleRepository thread-safe? Do I have to create a SimpleRepository in every method instead of using a singleton? What about performance when I do that? I looked at the SimpleRepository source code and I think that the migration code is not thread safe because the "private readonly List migrated;" is not synchronized but I might be wrong.
Maybe I'm missing something and I can just ignore multi-threading and configure IIS differently?
Thanks for your help!
We are developing a WCF based system. In the process we are trying to lock some data from being modified by more than one users. So we decided to have a data structure that will contain the necessary information for the locking logic to execute (by for example storing the ID of the locked objects)
The problem we are having is persisting that data between sessions. Is there anyway we can avoid executing expensive database calls?
I am not sure how can we do that in WCF since it can only persist data (in memory) during an open session.
Static members of the service implementing class are shared between sessions & calls.
One option would be to use static members as Jimmy McNulty said. I have a WCF service that opens network connections based on a user-specified IP address. My service is configured for PerCall service instance mode. In each session, I check a static data structure to see if a network connection is already opened for the specified IP address. Here's an example.
[ServiceContract]
public interface IMyService
{
[OperationContract]
void Start(IPAddress address);
}
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.PerCall)]
public class MyService : IMyService
{
private static readonly List<IPAddress> _addresses = new List<IPAddress>();
public void Start(IPAddress address)
{
lock(((ICollection)_addresses).SyncRoot)
{
if (!_addresses.Contains(address)
{
// Open the connection here and then store the address.
_addresses.Add(address);
}
}
}
}
As configured, each call to Start() happens within its own service instance, and each instance has access to the static collection. Since each service instance operates within a separate thread, access to the collection must be synchonized.
As with all synchronization done in multithreaded programming, be sure to minimize the amount of time spent in the lock. In the example shown, once the first caller grabs the lock, all other callers must wait until the lock is released. This works in my situation, but may not work in yours.
Another option would be to use the Single service instance mode as opposed to the PerCall service instance mode.
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.Single)]
public class MyService : IMyService
{ ... }
From everything I've read, though, the PerCall seems more flexible.
You can follow this link for differences between the two.
And don't forget that the class that implements your service is just that - a class. It works like all C# classes do. You can add a static constructor, properties, event handlers, implement additional interfaces, etc.
Perhaps a caching framework like velocity help you out.
Create a second class and set its InstanceContextMode to single and move all the expensive methods there, then in your original class use that methods.