Question

I’m building an ASP.NET MVC website with a WCF webservice backend that talks to the database via NHibernate. At the moment as POC I have one webservice called UserService which contains all the methods I need. The problem I have is that I have a DataRepository object which wraps the NHibernate configuration. When I create a new data repository object it loads the NHibernate configuration and mappings and cache etc. For my website in the users session, I want to keep this DataRepository object open for the life of their session as it doesn’t make sense to keep re-configuring NHibernate on a per-call basis and I want the same data repository to be available for all the webservice methods to benefit from NHibernate caching.

Is the answer here to make a static DataRepository object at the UserService.cs class level and configure the website to instantiate on a per-session basis, and would that mean each users session contains it’s own static datarepository object for the life of their session? Or is there a better way? Is there anything I haven’t thought of with the above approach?

Answer 1

I would suggest a better approach. Do not share the repository, share the hibernate’s session and make it injectable into the repository.

 public class DataRepository {
     public DataRepository ( Session session ) {
     }
 }

This way you can precisely control the lifetime of both, the repository and the session. In particular, you could have a shared session (in a request scope) but always create a new (transient) repository.