Question

This word never makes sense to me. I wouldn’t understand ussualy why Database Access Objects are named with this naming convention and also i have seen many times this word used in others codes which wasn’t about Database objects.

Can someone explain mean of this word in programming to someone who is not english and can give some examples about general usage in programming area ?

Answer 1

in .NET AFAIK, We have Httpcontext in web and ObjectContext in Entity Framework. I’m not aware of any other use of context in .NET framework, but there may be more usages. So, here’s a simple explanation about the two I know.

• HttpContext:
  Encapsulates all HTTP-specific information about an individual HTTP request. Properties of this class include the Request object, the Response object, the Session object, and an AllErrors property which keeps an array of Exception objects occured during the current request. It’s simply a wrapper class.

• ObjectContext: Quoting from : https://github.com/geersch/EntityFrameworkObjectContext

every object returned by a query (Linq To Entities, Entities SQL…) is automatically attached to an object context. This context tracks the changes applied to these objects so that it can later figure out how to persist these changes to the underlying data store.
This object context is represented by a class fittingly named ObjectContext. The ObjectContext encapsulates a couple of things, namely:

• The connection to the underlying data store (database)
• Metadata describing the Entity Data Model (EDM)
• An ObjectStateManager for tracking changes to the objects

So, it seems like it is used basically when we want to manage some logically relative objects. Objects that we can put in one logical context. (e.g. entities in EF or Request/Response/Session/etc in HttpContext)