In my last post we talked about letting our container manage our ISession lifetime. Immediately after publishing this post, i’ve got a lot of reactions considering the management of transactions, more specifically about issuing a rollback when an exception has been thrown.

A simplistic approach would be to do this in every commandhandler:

public class MoveCustomerCommandHandler : ICommandHandler<MoveCustomerCommand>
{
  private readonly ISession session;

  public MoveCustomerCommandHandler(ISession session)
  {
    this.session = session;
  }

  public void Handle(MoveCustomerCommand command)
  {
    using (var transaction = session.BeginTransaction())
    {
      // Handling code ...
      transaction.Commit();
    }
  }
}

But this approach seems rather cumbersome and not very flexible. What if we could automate this repeated code pattern more or less like what behaviors are doing in a WCF context ? We need some sort of AOP approach.

Meet AutoTx interceptor

using System;
using Castle.DynamicProxy;
using NHibernate;
using IInterceptor = Castle.DynamicProxy.IInterceptor;

namespace Nebula.Bootstrapper.Interceptors
{
  public class AutoTxInterceptor : IInterceptor
  {
    private readonly Lazy<ISession> session;

    public AutoTxInterceptor(Lazy<ISession> session)
    {
      this.session = session;
    }

    private IInvocation Owner { get; set; }

    public void Intercept(IInvocation invocation)
    {
      BeginTransactionIfNeeded(invocation);

      try
      {
        invocation.Proceed();
        CommitTransactionIfNeeded(invocation);
      }
      catch (Exception)
      {
        RollBackTransactionIfNeeded(invocation);
        throw;
      }
    }

    private bool IsTransactionOwner(IInvocation invocation)
    {
      return (Owner == invocation);
    }

    private void BeginTransactionIfNeeded(IInvocation invocation)
    {
      if (session.Value.Transaction.IsActive) return;
      session.Value.BeginTransaction();
      Owner = invocation;
    }

    private void CommitTransactionIfNeeded(IInvocation invocation)
    {
      if (!IsTransactionOwner(invocation)) return;
      session.Value.Transaction.Commit();
      Owner = null;
    }

    private void RollBackTransactionIfNeeded(IInvocation invocation)
    {
      if (!IsTransactionOwner(invocation)) return;
      session.Value.Transaction.Rollback();
      Owner = null;
    }
  }
}

Basically this code takes the entire transaction idiom from our hands, it starts a transaction if not already started and if the interceptor started the transaction it will commit/rollback (depending on exceptions thrown) the transaction.

The registration

Nothing really special going on, just not forget to opt-in for Lazy resolving and register the interceptor as transient, so that it’s lifetime gets bound to whom it is intercepting.

var container = new WindsorContainer()

// opt-in for Lazy
container.Register(Component.For<ILazyComponentLoader>()
                            .ImplementedBy<LazyOfTComponentLoader>());

// Necessary session registration
// ...

// Bind lifestyle of to whom it is intercepting
container.Register(Component.For<AutoTxInterceptor>()
                            .LifestyleTransient());

// register all commandhandlers
container.Register(Classes.FromAssemblyContaining(typeof (NHibernateConfigurationBuilder))
                          .BasedOn(typeof (ICommandHandler<>))
                          .WithService.Base()
                          .Configure(c => { c.Interceptors<AutoTxInterceptor>(); })
                          .LifestyleTransient());