Share Object to all Users of mvc Webapp - asp.net-mvc

My web App prepares out of a db for one or two minutes a specific and read-only object list, once only when IIS starts. This does not change any more unless the admin triggers recreation by a specific URL.
The Interface of the objects looks like this:
public interface IProductsRepository {
IQueryable<Row1> ProductItmes { get; }
IQueryable<Row2> ProductLegItems { get; }
}
I am now not really sure where i put the object so it is accessible from any controller.
Should i put the load method to protected void Application_Start() as a static object? What is the best approach?

you need to use a dependency injection framework here so you can instantiate this one and pass it into all of your controllers. This doesn't come out of the box with asp.net-mvc but you can find a number of options that will do the trick like castle windsor or autofac

This may or may not meet your needs but Castle Windsor allows you to specify how many instances a component (like a data repository) will have. I personally had a typo when working with this (lifesyle instead of lifestyle) that resulted in the data repository persisting after a post without my initializing it.
http://www.castleproject.org/container/documentation/trunk/usersguide/lifestyles.html

A good place would be the the Cache. You can load the Cache on Application_Start()

You can store it in Application object, but you should inject it into Controller. You shouldn't reference directly Application object, because this will make your application less testable. I use Ninject (http://ninject.org/) for this purpose.

Related

Ninject/.NET MVC3 - Scope?

I'm a beginner with both .NET MVC and Ninject.
Here how I get my Ninject kernel:
using Ninject;
public class NinjectKernel
{
private static IKernel _Instance = new StandardKernel();
public static IKernel getInstance()
{
return _Instance;
}
}
Here's how I save an instance of an object I want to re-use:
(...) NK = NinjectKernel.getInstance();
private Game getGameInstance() {
IGame iGame;
try
{
iGame = NK.Get<IGame>(DefaultGameName);
}
catch
{
NK.Bind<IGame>().To<Game>().InSingletonScope().Named(DefaultGameName)
.WithConstructorArgument("ColorChoiceCount", 12)
.WithConstructorArgument("CodeLength", 6)
.WithConstructorArgument("TurnsToBePlayed", 8)
.WithConstructorArgument("DoubleColorAllowed", true)
;
iGame = NK.Get<IGame>(DefaultGameName);
}
return (Game)iGame;
}
I want the Game object to be re-usable within a use "session", which means that if he leaves the site this instance won't be used again. But in the current situation, while debugging, when I close the application and re-launch it, I always re-get the instance of my previous "session".
I would also like to know if I won't get the same instance for multiple users because I don't want this. (users may be or may not be authentified, right now they aren't at all).
(You may also suggest my a better solution than using a try/catch there, because I'm sure there must be one, but as this works it is not a priority for now.)
Thank you for your help.
You don't have to do any of that. Just use Nuget to install Ninject.MVC3. This will automatically setup the project to use the MVC DependencyResolver API, and it will create a NinjectMVC3.cs file to create your mappings.
You could check this excellent & easy to follow post for the usage of Ninject with MVC 3 / 4 : http://dotnetfever.com/implementing-dependency-injection-in-asp-net-mvc-4-using-ninject-di-container/
I recommend you redesign your web application and avoid reusing the Game Object within a "Session". The reason is that web application is design to be "stateless", which means it shall not remember the user'data accross multiple requests. The stateless nature could help your web application with better performance and better scalability.
If you do need to remember one user's Game object as long as he is in your site, then try to build the Game Object on every request. If the building is very expensive (connecting to database eg.) then use the asp.net cache to store the object for later reuse.
In a word, use cache, not Ninject to preserve the Game Object.

MVC3, Ninject, MvcSiteMapProvider - How to inject dependency to overridden method

I have an MVC3 application that is using Ninject and MvcSiteMapProvider.
I have created this class which MvcSiteMapProvider uses to dynamically add nodes to my sitemap:
public class PageNodeProvider : DynamicNodeProviderBase
{
public override IEnumerable<DynamicNode> GetDynamicNodeCollection()
{
// need to get repository instance
var repository = // how do I get this???
foreach (var item in repository.GetItems())
{
yield return MakeDynamicNode(item);
}
}
}
The MvcSiteMapProvider instantiates this type itself, so I'm not sure how to inject my repository into it.
I thought about using service location by getting a handle on my kernel and calling Get<Repository>() in the method. But, I saw this property when looking at the definition of NinjectHttpApplication:
// Summary:
// Gets the kernel.
[Obsolete("Do not use Ninject as Service Locator")]
public IKernel Kernel { get; }
Do not use Ninject as Service Locator ?! How else am I supposed to do this?
I then found this question here on stackoverflow and all answers say don't use Service Location.
What am I supposed to do?
This seems to be another chapter from the book "Why providers are bad design?". You have the same problem as with any kind of ASP.NET providers. There are no really good and satisfying solutions for them. Just hacks.
I think the best option you have is to fork the project and change the DefaultSiteMapProvider to use DepencencyResolver instead of the Activator and provide the implementation back to the community. Then you can use constructor injection in your PageNodeProvider implementation. This will solve the problem once for all types and everyone.
Of course you could also use the DependencyResolver just in your implementation. But this is by far not the best solution because you should get the instances as close to the root as possible, it makes testing more complicated and it solves the problem just for you.
Even though I see that you've decided to ditch the provider altogether, I'd like to elaborate on using the DependencyResolver. Basically, you can manually get the correct repository instance via Ninject using
var repository = DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<IRepository>();
This is less robust, as you have to maintain this as well as the NinjectMVC3.cs class should the stuff change, and it is a bit more complicated to test.

The proper way to do Dependency Injection in a Windows Client (WPF) Application

I am used to IoC/DI in web applications - mainly Ninject with MVC3. My controller is created for me, filled in with all dependencies in place, subdependencies etc.
However, things are different in a thick client application. I have to create my own objects, or I have to revert to a service locator style approach where I ask the kernel (probably through some interface, to allow for testability) to give me an object complete with dependencies.
However, I have seen several places that Service Locator has been described as an anti-pattern.
So my question is - if I want to benefit from Ninject in my thick client app, is there a better/more proper way to get all this?
Testability
Proper DI / IoC
The least amount of coupling possible
Please note I am not just talking about MVVM here and getting view models into views. This is specifically triggered by a need to provide a repository type object from the kernel, and then have entities fetched from that repository injected with functionality (the data of course comes from the database, but they also need some objects as parameters depending on the state of the world, and Ninject knows how to provide that). Can I somehow do this without leaving both repositories and entities as untestable messes?
If anything is unclear, let me know. Thanks!
EDIT JULY 14th
I am sure that the two answers provided are probably correct. However, every fiber of my body is fighting this change; Some of it is probably caused by a lack of knowledge, but there is also one concrete reason why I have trouble seeing the elegance of this way of doing things;
I did not explain this well enough in the original question, but the thing is that I am writing a library that will be used by several (4-5 at first, maybe more later) WPF client applications. These applications all operate on the same domain model etc., so keeping it all in one library is the only way to stay DRY. However, there is also the chance that customers of this system will write their own clients - and I want them to have a simple, clean library to talk to. I don't want to force them to use DI in their Composition Root (using the term like Mark Seeman in his book) - because that HUGELY complicates things in comparison to them just newing up a MyCrazySystemAdapter() and using that.
Now, the MyCrazySystemAdapter (name chosen because I know people will disagree with me here) needs to be composed by subcomponents, and put together using DI. MyCrazySystemAdapter itself shouldn't need to be injected. It is the only interface the clients needs to use to talk to the system. So a client happily should get one of those, DI happens like magic behind the scenes, and the object is composed by many different objects using best practices and principles.
I do realize that this is going to be a controversial way of wanting to do things. However, I also know the people who are going to be clients of this API. If they see that they need to learn and wire up a DI system, and create their whole object structure ahead of time in their application entry point (Composition Root), instead of newing up a single object, they will give me the middle finger and go mess with the database directly and screw things up in ways you can hardly imagine.
TL;DR: Delivering a properly structured API is too much hassle for the client. My API needs to deliver a single object - constructed behind the scenes using DI and proper practices - that they can use. The real world some times trumps the desire to build everything backwards in order to stay true to patterns and practices.
I suggest to have a look at MVVM frameworks like Caliburn. They provide integration with IoC containers.
Basically, you should build up the complete application in your app.xaml. If some parts need to be created later because you do not yet know everything to create them at startup then inject a factory either as interface (see below) or Func (see Does Ninject support Func (auto generated factory)?) into the class that needs to create this instance. Both will be supported natively in the next Ninject release.
e.g.
public interface IFooFactory { IFoo CreateFoo(); }
public class FooFactory : IFooFactory
{
private IKernel kernel;
FooFactory(IKernel kernel)
{
this.kernel = kernel;
}
public IFoo CreateFoo()
{
this.kernel.Get<IFoo>();
}
}
Note that the factory implementation belongs logically to the container configuration and not to the implementation of your business classes.
I don't know anything about WPF or MVVM, but your question is basically about how to get stuff out of the container without using a Service Locator (or the container directly) all over the place, right?
If yes, I can show you an example.
The point is that you use a factory instead, which uses the container internally. This way, you are actually using the container in one place only.
Note: I will use an example with WinForms and not tied to a specific container (because, as I said, I don't know WPF...and I use Castle Windsor instead of NInject), but since your basic question is not specificaly tied to WPF/NInject, it should be easy for you to "port" my answer to WFP/NInject.
The factory looks like this:
public class Factory : IFactory
{
private readonly IContainer container;
public Factory(IContainer container)
{
this.container = container;
}
public T GetStuff<T>()
{
return (T)container.Resolve<T>();
}
}
The main form of your app gets this factory via constructor injection:
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
private readonly IFactory factory;
public MainForm(IFactory factory)
{
this.factory = factory;
InitializeComponent(); // or whatever needs to be done in a WPF form
}
}
The container is initialized when the app starts, and the main form is resolved (so it gets the factory via constructor injection).
static class Program
{
static void Main()
{
var container = new Container();
container.Register<MainForm>();
container.Register<IFactory, Factory>();
container.Register<IYourRepository, YourRepository>();
Application.Run(container.Resolve<MainForm>());
}
}
Now the main form can use the factory to get stuff like your repository out of the container:
var repo = this.factory.GetStuff<IYourRepository>();
repo.DoStuff();
If you have more forms and want to use the factory from there as well, you just need to inject the factory into these forms like into the main form, register the additional forms on startup as well and open them from the main form with the factory.
Is this what you wanted to know?
EDIT:
Ruben, of course you're right. My mistake.
The whole stuff in my answer was an old example that I had lying around somewhere, but I was in a hurry when I posted my answer and didn't read the context of my old example carefully enough.
My old example included having a main form, from which you can open any other form of the application. That's what the factory was for, so you don't have to inject every other form via constructor injection into the main form.
Instead, you can use the factory to open any new form:
var form = this.factory.GetStuff<IAnotherForm>();
form.Show();
Of course you don't need the factory just to get the repository from a form, as long as the repository is passed to the form via constructor injection.
If your app consists of only a few forms, you don't need the factory at all, you can just pass the forms via constructor injection as well:
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
private readonly IAnotherForm form;
// pass AnotherForm via constructor injection
public MainForm(IAnotherForm form)
{
this.form = form;
InitializeComponent(); // or whatever needs to be done in a WPF form
}
// open AnotherForm
private void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.form.Show();
}
}
public partial class AnotherForm : Form
{
private readonly IRepository repo;
// pass the repository via constructor injection
public AnotherForm(IRepository repo)
{
this.repo= repo;
InitializeComponent(); // or whatever needs to be done in a WPF form
// use the repository
this.repo.DoStuff();
}
}

NHibernate: "failed to lazily initialize...", DDD approach

I'm trying to set up NHibernate in an ASP.NET MVC application using a DDD approach. However, I do get an error when trying to lazy load an objects related entity. Heres how I've structured my application:
Infrastructure layer:
Contains mapping files, repository implementations and a NHibernate bootstrapper to configure and build a session factory.
Heres a repository example:
public class CustomerRepository : ICustomerRepository
{
public Customer GetCustomerById(int customerId)
{
using (var session = NHibernateBootstrapper.OpenSession())
return session.Get<Customer>(customerId);
}
}
Domain layer:
Has simple POCO classes, repository and service interfaces
Application layer:
Contains Service implementations.
Heres a service example:
public class CustomerService : ICustomerService
{
private ICustomerRepository _repository;
public CustomerService(ICustomerRepository repository)
{
_repository = repository;
}
public Customer GetCustomerById(int customerId)
{
return _repository.GetCustomerById(customerId);
}
}
Presentation layer:
Contains the ASP.NET MVC application. And this is where I discovered my problem.
Using the MVC approach, I have a controller which, using the CustomerService service, gets a customer and displays the customer in a View (strongly typed). This customer has a related entity Contact, and when I try to access it in my View using Model.Contact, where Model is my Customer object, I get an LazyInitializationException.
I know why I get this. It's because the session used to retrieve the Customer in the CustomerRepository is dead by now. My problem is how I can fix this. I would like if I could avoid getting the related Contact entity for the Customer in my repository, because some views only need the Customer data, not the Contact data. If this is possible at all?
So to the question: is it possible to wait querying the database, until the presentation layer needs the related entity Contact?
I think that what I need is something like what this article describes. I just can't figure out how to implement it in infrastructure layer, or where should it be implemented?
Thanks in advance. Any help will be much appreciated!
As for session management it is common to use single session per request. You can see an example of implementation here. It is an open source project that were designed to setup new asp.net applications with the help of Nhibernate wery easy. source code can be founded here.
Hope it helps.
I also recommend Sharp Architecture.
Another approach, as well as suggestion, is to avoid passing entities to views. There're other problems with it except session management - business rules leaking into views, bloated/spagetti code in there, etc. Use ViewModel approach.
Another problem you'll get is storing your entities in Session. Once you try to get your Customer from Session["customer"] you'll get the same exception. There're several solutions to this, for example storing IDs, or adding repository methods to prevent lazy-loading of objects you're going to store in session - read NHibernate's SetFetchMode - which, of course, you can also use to pass entity to views. But as I said you better stick with ViewModel approach. Google for ViewModel, or refer to ASP.NET MVC In Action book, which uses samples of code from http://code.google.com/p/codecampserver/. Also read this, for example.
Are all your properties and methods in your Customer class marked virtual?
How are you opening and closing your session? I use an ActionFilterAttribute called TransactionPerRequest and decorate all my controllers with it.
Check out this for an implementation.

NHibernate session management in ASP.NET MVC

I am currently playing around with the HybridSessionBuilder class found on Jeffrey Palermo's blog post:
http://jeffreypalermo.com/blog/use-this-nhibernate-wrapper-to-keep-your-repository-classes-simple/
Using this class, my repository looks like this:
public class UserRepository : IUserRepository
{
private readonly ISessionBuilder _sessionBuilder;
public UserRepository(ISessionBuilder sessionBuilder)
{
_sessionBuilder = sessionBuilder;
}
public User GetByID(string userID)
{
using (ISession session = _sessionBuilder.GetSession())
{
return session.Get<User>(userID);
}
}
}
Is this the best way to go about managing the NHibernate session / factory? I've heard things about Unit of Work and creating a session per web request and flushing it at the end. From what I can tell, my current implementation isn't doing any of this. It is basically relying on the Repository to grab the session from the session factory and use it to run the queries.
Are there any pitfalls to doing database access this way?
You should not wrap your ISession in a using statement -- the point of passing the ISessionBuilder into the repository constructor (dependency injection) is that the calling code is responsible for controlling the life cycle of the ISession. By wrapping it in a using, Dispose() is called on the ISession and you won't be able to lazy load object members or persist it.
We do something similar by just passing in an ISession to the repository constructor. Mr. Palermo's code, as I understand it, simply adds lazy initialization of the ISession. I don't think that's needed because why would you new up a repository if you're not going to use it?
With ASP.Net MVC you want to make sure the life of the session is maintained during the Action method on your controller, as once your controller has exited all your data should be collected. I am not sure if this mechanism will help with that.
You might want to look into S#arp Architechure which is a set of libraries and guidance for building ASP.Net MVC application using nHibernate. http://code.google.com/p/sharp-architecture/
This is the setup I used after researching this more. Seems to work great and doesn't have that annoying habit of creating an ISession on static file requests like most guides out there:
http://www.kevinwilliampang.com/2010/04/06/setting-up-asp-net-mvc-with-fluent-nhibernate-and-structuremap/
I wouldn't open and close sessions on each data request to NHibernate. I would use the Unit of Work libraries that many others suggest or do some more reading. NHForge.org is getting started and I believe that there are some practices on setting up NHibernate for a general web application.
One of the "oh wow that's cool moments" that I've gotten from NHibernate was taking advantage of lazily loading collections during development. It was a neat experience being able to not have to do all those joins in order to display data on some associated object.
By closing the session like this, the above scenario would not be possible.
There might be something that is going on with transactions as well.
Just found a clean solution using Unity to inject a session per request:
http://letsfollowtheyellowbrickroad.blogspot.com/2010/05/nhibernate-sessions-in-aspnet-mvc.html

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