Question

I have a data entry ASP.NET application. During a one complete data entry many transactions occur. I would like to keep track of all those transactions so that if the user wants to abandon the data entry, all the transaction of which I have been keeping record can be rolled back.

SQL 2008 ,Framework version is 4.0 and I am using c#.

Answer 1

This is always a tough lesson to learn for people that are new to web development. But here it is:

Each round trip web request is a separate, stand-alone thread of execution

That means, simply put, each time you submit a page request (click a button, navigate to a new page, even refresh a page) then it can run on a different thread than the previous one. What’s more, even if you do get the same thread twice, several other web requests may have been processed by the thread in the time between your two requests.

This makes it effectively impossible to span simple transactions across more than one web request.

Here’s another concept that you should keep in mind:

Transactions are intended for batch operations, not interactive operations.

What this means is that transactions are meant to be short-lived, and to encompass several operations executing sequentially (or simultaneously) in which all operations are atomic, and intended to either all complete, or all fail. Transactions are not typically designed to be long-lived (meaning waiting for a user to decide on various actions interactively).

Web apps are not desktop apps. They don’t function like them. You have to change your thinking when you do web apps. And the biggest lesson to learn, each request is a stand-alone unit of execution.

Now, above, I said “simple transactions”, also known as lightweight or local transactions. There’s also what’s known as a Distributed Transaction, and to use those requires a Distributed Transaction Coordinator. MSDTC is pretty commonly used. However, DT’s perform much more slowly than LWT’s. Also, they require that the infrastructure be setup to use a DTC.

It’s possible to span a transaction over web requests using a DTC. This is done by “Enlisting” in a Distribute Transaction, and then somehow sharing this transaction identifier between requests. But this is a lot of work to setup, and deal with, and has a lot of error prone situations. It’s not something you want to do if you have other options.

In general, you’re better off adding the data to a temporary table or tables, and then when the final save is done, transfer that data to the permanent tables. Another option is to maintain some state (such as using ViewState or Session) to keep track of the changes.

One popular way of doing this is to perform operations client-side using JavaScript and then submitting all the changes to the server when you are done. This is difficult to implement if you need to navigate to different pages, however.