Question

I designed the data access portion of our framework so that every time a business object (BO) needs to interact with the database, it would have to open a connection, invoke the data access layer (to execute the query), and then close the connection. Then if it needed to run in a transaction, it would open the connection, begin the transaction, invoke the data access layer (to execute the query) and then commit the transaction, close the transaction, and finally close the connection.

I did it this way in the mindset of “open late, close early”… but what if I needed to call other BOs to submit data in a single transaction? Is there a better way to handle opening and closing connections as well as working with transactions?

I’m a rookie in designing application architecture, so I hope I’m not doing this wrongly… any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

If a given business object needs to execute various methods in a transaction, use a TransactionScope like so:

using ( var transactionScope = new TransactionScope() )
{
    this.Save();
    childObjA.Save();
    childObjB.Save();
    childObjC.Save();
    childObjD.Save();

    transactionScope.Complete();
}

If any of the objects throws an exception, it will rollback the transaction.

See the MSDN reference page for TransactionScope for more.