Question

I’ve implemented a repository pattern with persistence ignorance. The repository implementation only interacts with my entity objects, IUnitOfWork and ITable<T> interfaces. The intention is that the IUnitOfWork isn’t reused but represents a single transaction. So far, I’ve implemented in-memory as well as Linq-to-Sql versions of the IUnitOfWork and ITable<T>.

My problem is that due to the IUnitOfWork injection into the repository, I end up with needing to know how to instantiate a new IUnitOfWork where ever the repository is used. Since this is the primary piece that is supposed to be pluggable it feels like I’ve done something wrong. The general usage pattern is something like this:

FooUnitOfWork unitOfWork = new FooUnitOfWork();
Repository repos = new Repository(unitOfWork);
// ...act upon repos
unitOfWork.Save();

Now it appears that I need some other pattern to allow every repository usage in the app to obtain the correct unit of work (e.g. in-memory, L2S, etc.).

What is the most fitting pattern for this? I’ve looked at Fowler’s discussion on the topic but none of his examples seem to be a clean fit. I already feel like the amount of abstraction that I have is more than I’d like so building yet another indirection seems excessive.

At the moment, I’m leaning toward some sort of app-wide provider which can be configured to produce the correct IUnitOfWork. Am I off-base or is this what is needed to truly be implementation agnostic?

Answer 1

Update: while this didn’t really break down it ended up just producing a poor-man’s IoC Container. I ended up just replacing all of these:

UnitOfWorkFactory.Create();

with the generalized Common Service Locator implementation:

Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation.ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IUnitOfWork>();

This allowed me to create a library which uses Dependency Injection without forcing all users to use the same IoC framework.

---

Perhaps I should use a very simple factory where I can set a callback? It could have a set of static methods on it like this:

public static class UnitOfWorkFactory
{
    private static Func<IUnitOfWork> FactoryMethod;

    public static IUnitOfWork Create()
    {
        if (UnitOfWorkFactory.FactoryMethod == null)
        {
            throw new InvalidOperationException("...");
        }

        return UnitOfWorkFactory.FactoryMethod();
    }

    public static void SetFactoryMethod(Func<IUnitOfWork> factory)
    {
        UnitOfWorkFactory.FactoryMethod = factory;
    }
}

Where does this break down?