Repositories, Unit Of Work and ASP.NET MVC

There are a lot of posts discussing repository implementations, unit of work and ASP.NET MVC. This post is an attempt to give you an answer which addresses all three issues.

Repositories

Do NOT create generic repositories. They look fine when you look at them. But as the application grows, you’ll notice that you have to do some workarounds in them which will break open/closed principle.

It’s much better to create repositories that are specific for an entity and it’s aggregate since it’s much easier to show intent. And you’ll also only create methods that you really need, YAGNI.

Generic repositories also remove the whole idea with choosing an OR/M since you can’t use your favorite OR/Ms features.

Unit Of Work

Most OR/Ms available do already implement the UoW pattern. You simply just need to create an interface and make an adapter (Google Adapter pattern) implementation for your OR/M.

Interface:

public interface IUnitOfWork : IDisposable
{
    void SaveChanges();
}

NHibernate sample implementation:

public class NHibernateUnitOfWork : IUnitOfWork
{
    private readonly ITransaction _transaction;

    public NHibernateUnitOfWork(ISession session)
    {
        if (session == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("session");
        _transaction = session.BeginTransaction();
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (!_transaction.WasCommitted)
            _transaction.Rollback();

        _transaction.Dispose();
    }

    public void SaveChanges()
    {
        _transaction.Commit();
    }
}

ASP.NET MVC

I prefer to use an attribute to handle transactions in MVC. It makes the action methods cleaner:

[HttpPost, Transactional]
public ActionResult Update(YourModel model)
{
    //your logic here
}

And the attribute implementation:

public class TransactionalAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    private IUnitOfWork _unitOfWork;

    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        _unitOfWork = DependencyResolver.Current.GetService<IUnitOfWork>();

        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }

    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        // let the container dispose/rollback the UoW.
        if (filterContext.Exception == null)
            _unitOfWork.SaveChanges();

        base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
    }
}