Question

I’d like to use EF directly in a business / service layer without using repositories but wondered where the best place to create / dispose the context if I want to make the class testable using a test DB?

Should it be using DI in the service constructor and mark the class as IDisposable and get rid of it there or just wrap each call in a using block?

Answer 1

I’m not sure on your reluctance on a repository class, but this is where I’ve been creating a destroying the EF context for my service layer.

So for my MVC web app, I register the repository using Autofac with lifetimescope

builder
       .RegisterType<AccountRepository>()
       .AsImplementedInterfaces()
       .InstancePerLifetimeScope();

My account service will get a reference to a repository instance from the container and will have access to a single context throughout the life time of the web request. Once the request is finished, Autofac will call dispose on the repository and clean up the context.

public sealed class AccountRepository : IAccountRepository, IDisposable
{
    private AccountContext _context = new AccountContext();

    public IList<AccountEntity> GetAccounts()
    {
        return _context.Accounts
            .OrderBy(x => x.Name)
            .ToList();
    } 

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _context.Dispose();
        _context = null;
    }
}