CreateDbCommandDefinition fires twice during method PUT through WCF Data Services - entity-framework-4

We are trying to develop our own EF provider for our legacy APIs. We managed to get "GET/POST" operation working successfully.
However, for operation "PUT/MERGE", the method "CreateDbCommandDefinition" (of DbProviderServices implementation) fires twice. One with "DbQueryCommandTree" and another with "DbUpdateCommandTree".
I understand that it needs to fetch the entity prior to update it (for change tracking I guess). In our case, I don't need the entity information to be fetched prior to update. I simply want to call our legacy APIs with the entity sent for update. How can we strictly ask it to not to do the work of "DbQueryCommandTree" (and do only the work of "DbUpdateCommandTree") when I working with "PUT/MERGE" operations.
The client code looks something like the one below:
public void CustomerUpdateTest()
{
try
{
Ctxt.MergeOption = MergeOption.NoTracking;
var oNewCus = new Customer()
{
MasterCustomerId = "1001",
SubCustomerId = "0",
FirstName = "abc",
LastName = "123"
};
Ctxt.AttachTo("Customers", oNewCus);
Ctxt.UpdateObject(oNewCus);
//Ctxt.SaveChanges();
Ctxt.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions.ReplaceOnUpdate);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Assert.Fail(ex.Message);
}

You will have to write your own IDataServiceUpdateProvider to make this happen. For EF, the in built EF update provider does 2 queries - one to get the entity which needs to be modified and one for the actual modification. We are planning to make this provider public in our next release, so folks can derive from it and just override one or more methods. But for now, you will have to implement the interface yourself.
For PUT/MERGE requests, WCF Data Services calls IDataServiceUpdateProvider.GetResource to get the entity to update. In your implementation of this method, you can return a token that represents the object that need to get modified (you will have to visit the expression tree that gets passed in this method to find out the entity set and the key value of the entity in question).
In SaveChanges, you can push the update based on the token. That way you can avoid one round trip to the database.
Hope this helps.

Related

which is the difference betwwen this two ways to refresh the dbContext?

I am using EF 4.4 and I would like to update many entities, but some other user can modified many of the entities that the first user is modified. So I get a concurrency exception. Other case is that the first user tries to add many new registers and other user added some of them meanwhile. So I have an exception that exists some of the registers (unique constraint).
I would like to ensure that the first user finish his operation add only the registers that does no exists yet (add all his entities except the entities that are added by the second user).
To do that, I need to update the entities in my dbContext so I see that there at least two options.
First, in the catch when I capture the update exception, I can do:
ex.Entries.Single().Reload();
The second option is:
myContext.Entry<MyTable>(instance).Reload();
I guess that the second option only refreshes the entity that I use as parameter, but if the problem is that I need to refresh many entities, how can I do that?
What really does the first option, Single().Reload?
When you do
ex.Entries.Single().Reload();
you are sure that the offending entity is refreshed. What is does is taking the one and only (Single) entity from the DbUpdateConcurrencyException.Entries that could not be saved to the database (in case of a concurrency exception this is always exactly one).
When you do
myContext.Entry(instance).Reload();
You are not sure that you refresh the right entity unless you know that only one entity had changes before SaveChanges was called. If you save an entity with child entities any one of them can cause a concurrency problem.
In EF 6.x (6.1.3), below code will let you find all the changes; the way you asked in your question!
try
{
var listOfRefreshedObj = db.ChangeTracker.Entries().Select(x => x.Entity).ToList();
var objContext = ((IObjectContextAdapter)your_db_context).ObjectContext;
objContext.Refresh(System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects.RefreshMode.ClientWins, listOfRefreshedObj);
await db.Entry(<yourentity>).ReloadAsync();
return Content(HttpStatusCode.<code>, "<outputmessage>"); ;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
return Content(HttpStatusCode.<code>, "<exception>");
}
Explaination:
Query Entries in the ChangeTracker and store them in a list
var listOfRefreshedObj = db.ChangeTracker.Entries().Select(x => x.Entity).ToList();
Next is to refresh the context. In some cases (row is removed etc.), this will throw an exception which you can catch. RefreshMode.ClientWins tells EF to accept all client units as modified when next update occurs. In some cases, you might want to prompt the users with the changes and let them decide. RefreshMode Enumeration. An example is here ObjectContext.Refresh Method Example
objContext.Refresh(System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects.RefreshMode.ClientWins, listOfRefreshedObj);
You're probably doing this whole thing after you receive DbUpdateConcurrencyException anyways!

Breeze BeforeSaveEntityonly only allows update to Added entities

Don't know if this is intended or a bug, but the following code below using BeforeSaveEntity will only modify the entity for newly created records (EntityState = Added), and won't work for modified, is this correct?
protected override bool BeforeSaveEntity(EntityInfo entityInfo)
{
var entity = entityInfo.Entity;
if (entity is User)
{
var user = entity as User;
user.ModifiedDate = DateTime.Now;
user.ModifiedBy = 1;
}
...
The root of this issue is that on the breeze server we don’t have any built in change tracking mechanism for changes made on the server. Server entities can be pure poco. The breeze client has a rich change tracking capability for any client side changes but when you get to the server you need to manage this yourself.
The problem occurs because of an optimization we perform on the server so that we only update those properties that are changed. i.e. so that any SQL update statements are only made to the changed columns. Obviously this isn’t a problem for Adds or Deletes or those cases where we update a column that was already updated on the client. But if you update a field on the server that was not updated on the client then breeze doesn't know anything about it.
In theory we could snapshot each entity coming into the server and then iterate over every field on the entity to determine if any changes were made during save interception but we really hate the perf implications especially since this case will rarely occur.
So the suggestion made in another answer here to update the server side OriginalValuesMap is correct and will do exactly what you need.
In addition, as of version 1.1.3, there is an additional EntityInfo.ForceUpdate flag that you can set that will tell breeze to update every column in the specified entity. This isn't quite as performant as the suggestion above, but it is simpler, and the effects will be the same in either case.
Hope this helps.
I had the same problem, and I solved that doing this:
protected override bool BeforeSaveEntity(EntityInfo entityInfo)
{
if(entityInfo.EntityState== EntityState.Modified)
{
var entity = entityInfo.Entity;
entityInfo.OriginalValuesMap.Add("ModificationDate", entity.ModificationDate);
entity.ModificationDate = DateTime.Now;
}
}
I think you can apply this easily to your case.

InSingletonScope using Ninject and a Windows Service

I re-posted this question as I think it is a bit vague. New Post
I am currently using a Windows Service that is on a 2 minute timer. I am using EF code first with a repository pattern for data access. I am using Ninject to inject my dependencies. I have the following bindings in my NinjectDependencyResolver class:
ConnectionStringSettings connectionStringSettings = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Database"];
Bind<IDatabaseFactory>().To<DatabaseFactory>()
.InSingletonScope()
.WithConstructorArgument("connectionString", connectionStringSettings.Name);
Bind<IUnitOfWork>().To<UnitOfWork>().InSingletonScope();
Bind<IMyRepository>().To<MyRepository>().InSingletonScope();
When my service runs every 2 minutes I do some thing similar to this:
foreach (var row in rows)
{
var existing = myRepository.GetById(row.Id);
if (existing == null)
{
existing = new Row();
myRepository.Add(existing);
unitOfWork.Commit();
}
}
I am starting to see an error in my logs that say:
The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges.
Is it correct to use InSingeltonScope when using Ninject in a Windows Service? I believe I tried using different scopes like InTransientScope but I could only get InSingeltonScope to work with data access. Does the error message have anything to do with Scope or is it unrelated?
Assuming that the service is not the only process that operates on the database you shouldn't use Singleton. What happens in this case is that you are reusing a DBContext that has cached entities which are out of date.
The better way is to treat each timer execution of the service in a similar way like it is a web/wcf request and create a new job processor for the request.
var processor = factory.CreateRowsProcessor();
processor.ProcessRows(rows);
public class RowsProcessor
{
public Processor(UoW uow, ....)
{
...
}
public void ProcessRows(Rows[] rows)
{
foreach (var row in rows)
{
var existing = myRepository.GetById(row.Id);
if (existing == null)
{
existing = new Row();
myRepository.Add(existing);
unitOfWork.Commit();
}
}
}
}
Depending of the problem it might even better to put the loop outside and have a new processor for each single row.
Read http://www.planetgeek.ch/2011/12/31/ninject-extensions-factory-introduction/ for more information about factories. Also have a look at the InCallScope of the named scope extension if you need to inject the UoW into multiple classes. http://www.planetgeek.ch/2010/12/08/how-to-use-the-additional-ninject-scopes-of-namedscope/
InSingletonScope will create singleton context = one context for the whole lifetime of your service. It is very bad solution. Because context holds all objects from all previous time events its memory consumption grows and there are possibilities to get errors as the one you are receiving at the moment (but the error really can be unrelated to your singleton context but most likely it is not). The exception says that you have two different objects with the same key identifier tracked by the context - that is not allowed.
Instead of using singleton uow, repository and context use singleton factory and in each time even request new fresh instances from the factory. Dispose context at the end of the time event processing.

System.InvalidOperationException when trying to iteratively add objects using EF 4

This question is very similiar to this one. However, the resolution to that question:
Does not seem to apply, or
Are somewhat suspect, and don't seem like a good approach to resolving the problem.
Basically, I'm iterating over a generic list of objects, and inserting them. Using MVC 2, EF 4 with the default code generation.
foreach(Requirement r in requirements)
{
var car = new CustomerAgreementRequirement();
car.CustomerAgreementId = viewModel.Agreement.CustomerAgreementId;
car.RequirementId = r.RequirementId;
_carRepo.Add(car); //Save new record
}
And the Repository.Add() method:
public class BaseRepository<TEntity> : IRepository<TEntity> where TEntity : class
{
private TxRPEntities txDB;
private ObjectSet<TEntity> _objectSet;
public void Add(TEntity entity)
{
SetUpdateParams(entity);
_objectSet.AddObject(entity);
txDB.SaveChanges();
}
I should note that I've been successfully using the Add() method throughout my code for single inserts; this is the first time I've tried to use it to iteratively insert a group of objects.
The error:
System.InvalidOperationException: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges.
As stated in the prior question, the EntityKey is set to True, StoreGeneratedPattern = Identity. The actual table that is being inserted into is a relationship table, in that it is comprised of an identity field and two foreign key fields. The error always occurs on the second insert, regardless of whether that specific entity has been inserted before or not, and I can confirm that the values are always different, no key conflicts as far as the database is concerned. My suspicion is that it has something to do with the temporary entitykey that gets set prior to the actual insert, but I don't know how to confirm that, nor do I know how to resolve it.
My gut feeling is that the solution in the prior question, to set the SaveOptions to None, would not be the best solution. (See prior discussion here)
I've had this issue with my repository using a loop as well and thought that it might be caused by some weird race-like condition. What I've done is refactor out a UnitOfWork class, so that the repository.add() method is strictly adding to the database, but not storing the context. Thus, the repository is only responsible for the collection itself, and every operation on that collection happens in the scope of the unit of work.
The issue there is that: In a loop, you run out of memory damn fast with EF4. So you do need to store the changes periodically, I just don't store after every save.
public class BaseRepository : IRepository where TEntity : class
{
private TxRPEntities txDB;
private ObjectSet _objectSet;
public void Add(TEntity entity)
{
SetUpdateParams(entity);
_objectSet.AddObject(entity);
}
public void Save()
{
txDB.SaveChanges();
}
Then you can do something like
foreach(Requirement r in requirements)
{
var car = new CustomerAgreementRequirement();
car.CustomerAgreementId = viewModel.Agreement.CustomerAgreementId;
car.RequirementId = r.RequirementId;
_carRepo.Add(car); //Save new record
if (some number limiting condition if you have thousands)
_carRepo.Save(); // To save periodically and clear memory
}
_carRepo.Save();
Note: I don't really like this solution, but I hunted around to try to find why things break in a loop when they work elsewhere, and that's the best I came up with.
We have had some odd collision issues if the entity is not added to the context directly after being created (before doing any assignments). The only time I've noticed the issue is when adding objects in a loop.
Try adding the newed up entity to the context, do the assignments, then save the context. Also, you don't need to save the context each time you add a new entity unless you absolutely need the primary key.

ASP.NET MVC: Repository pattern high concurrency updates

I'm writing an app that we may be switching out the repository later (currently entity framework) to use either amazon or windows azure storage.
I have a service method that disables a user by the ID, all it does is set a property to true and set the DisabledDate. Should I call to the repository, get that user, set the properties in the service, then call to the save function in the repository? If I do this, then thats 2 database calls, should I worry about this? What if the user is updating the profile at the same time the admin is calling the disable method, and calls the user calls the save method in the repository (which currently holds false for the IsDisabled property?) Wouldn't that set the user back to being enabled if called right after the disabled method?
What is the best way to solve this problem? How do I update data in a high concurrent system?
CustomerRepository:
// Would be called from more specific method in Service Layer - e.g DisableUser
public void Update(Customer c)
{
var stub = new Customer { Id = c.Id }; // create "stub"
ctx.Customers.Attach(stub); // attach "stub" to graph
ctx.ApplyCurrentValues("Customers", c); // override scalar values of "stub"
ctx.SaveChanges(); // save changes - 1 call to DB. leave this out if you're using UoW
}
That should serve as a general-purpose "UPDATE" method in your repository. Should only be used when the entity exists.
That is just an example - in reality you should/could be using generics, checking for the existence of the entity in the graph before attaching, etc.
But that will get you on the right track.
As long as you know the id of the entity you want to save you should be able to do it by attaching the entity to the context first like so:
var c = new Customer();
c.Id = someId;
context.AttachTo("Customer", c)
c.PropertyToChange = "propertyValue";
context.SaveChanges();
Whether this approach is recommended or not, I'm not so sure as I'm not overly familiar with EF, but this will allow you to issue the update command without having to first load the entity.

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