Question

I’m currently working on a multi-tenant application that employs Shared DB/Shared Schema approach. IOW, we enforce tenant data segregation by defining a TenantID column on all tables. By convention, all SQL reads/writes must include a Where TenantID = ‘?’ clause. Not an ideal solution, but hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, since virtually every page/workflow in our app must display tenant specific data, I made the (poor) decision at the project’s outset to employ a Singleton to encapsulate the current user credentials (i.e. TenantID and UserID). My thinking at the time was that I didn’t want to add a TenantID parameter to each and every method signature in my Data layer.

Here’s what the basic pseudo-code looks like:

public class UserIdentity
    {
        public UserIdentity(int tenantID, int userID)
        {
            TenantID = tenantID;
            UserID = userID;
        }

        public int TenantID { get; private set; }
        public int UserID { get; private set; }
    }

    public class AuthenticationModule : IHttpModule
    {

        public void Init(HttpApplication context)
        {
            context.AuthenticateRequest +=
                new EventHandler(context_AuthenticateRequest);
        }

        private void context_AuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            var userIdentity = _authenticationService.AuthenticateUser(sender);
            if (userIdentity == null)
            {
                //authentication failed, so redirect to login page, etc
            }
            else
            {
                //put the userIdentity into the HttpContext object so that
                //its only valid for the lifetime of a single request
                HttpContext.Current.Items["UserIdentity"] = userIdentity;
            }
        }
    }


    public static class CurrentUser
    {
        public static UserIdentity Instance
        {
            get { return HttpContext.Current.Items["UserIdentity"]; }
        }
    }

  public class WidgetRepository: IWidgetRepository{

    public IEnumerable<Widget> ListWidgets(){
         var tenantId = CurrentUser.Instance.TenantID;
         //call sproc with tenantId parameter
    }
  }

As you can see, there are several code smells here. This is a singleton, so it’s already not unit test friendly. On top of that you have a very tight-coupling between CurrentUser and the HttpContext object. By extension, this also means that I have a reference to System.Web in my Data layer (shudder).

I want to pay down some technical debt this sprint by getting rid of this singleton for the reasons mentioned above. I have a few thoughts on what a better implementation might be, but if anyone has any guidance or lessons learned they could share, I would be much obliged.

Answer 1

CurrentUser isn’t quite a singleton. I’m not exactly sure what you’d call it. (A singleton by definition can only exist one at a time, and any number of UserIdentity instances can be created at will by outside code and coexist without any issues.)

Personally, i’d take CurrentUser.Instance and either move it to UserIdentity.CurrentUser, or put it together with whatever similar “get the global instance” methods and properties you have. Gets rid of the CurrentUser class, at least. While you’re at it, make the property settable at the same place — it’s already settable, just in an way that (1) would look like magic if the two classes weren’t shown right next to each other, and (2) makes changing how the current user identity is set later harder.

Doesn’t get rid of the global, but you’re not really gonna get around that without passing the UserIdentity to every function that needs it.