C# – Using transactions with subsonic

There is actually a (subtle) difference between the two. Imagine you have the following code in File1.cs:

// File1.cs
using System;
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    class Foo
    {
        static void Bar()
        {
            double d = Math.PI;
        }
    }
}

Now imagine that someone adds another file (File2.cs) to the project that looks like this:

// File2.cs
namespace Outer
{
    class Math
    {
    }
}

The compiler searches Outer before looking at those using directives outside the namespace, so it finds Outer.Math instead of System.Math. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), Outer.Math has no PI member, so File1 is now broken.

This changes if you put the using inside your namespace declaration, as follows:

// File1b.cs
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    using System;
    class Foo
    {
        static void Bar()
        {
            double d = Math.PI;
        }
    }
}

Now the compiler searches System before searching Outer, finds System.Math, and all is well.

Some would argue that Math might be a bad name for a user-defined class, since there's already one in System; the point here is just that there is a difference, and it affects the maintainability of your code.

It's also interesting to note what happens if Foo is in namespace Outer, rather than Outer.Inner. In that case, adding Outer.Math in File2 breaks File1 regardless of where the using goes. This implies that the compiler searches the innermost enclosing namespace before it looks at any using directive.

With the Entity Framework most of the time SaveChanges() is sufficient. This creates a transaction, or enlists in any ambient transaction, and does all the necessary work in that transaction.

Sometimes though the SaveChanges(false) + AcceptAllChanges() pairing is useful.

The most useful place for this is in situations where you want to do a distributed transaction across two different Contexts.

I.e. something like this (bad):

using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope())
{
    //Do something with context1
    //Do something with context2

    //Save and discard changes
    context1.SaveChanges();

    //Save and discard changes
    context2.SaveChanges();

    //if we get here things are looking good.
    scope.Complete();
}

If context1.SaveChanges() succeeds but context2.SaveChanges() fails the whole distributed transaction is aborted. But unfortunately the Entity Framework has already discarded the changes on context1, so you can't replay or effectively log the failure.

But if you change your code to look like this:

using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope())
{
    //Do something with context1
    //Do something with context2

    //Save Changes but don't discard yet
    context1.SaveChanges(false);

    //Save Changes but don't discard yet
    context2.SaveChanges(false);

    //if we get here things are looking good.
    scope.Complete();
    context1.AcceptAllChanges();
    context2.AcceptAllChanges();

}

While the call to SaveChanges(false) sends the necessary commands to the database, the context itself is not changed, so you can do it again if necessary, or you can interrogate the ObjectStateManager if you want.

This means if the transaction actually throws an exception you can compensate, by either re-trying or logging state of each contexts ObjectStateManager somewhere.

See my blog post for more.