Question

We have many instances in our application where we would like to be able to access things like the currently logged in user id in our business domain and data access layer. On log we push this information to the session, so all of our front end code has access to it fairly easily of course. However, we are having huge issues getting at the data in lower layers of our application. We just can’t seem to find a way to store a value in the business domain that has global scope just for the user (static classes and properties are of course shared by the application domain, which means all users in the session share just one copy of the object). We have considered passing in the session to our business classes, but then our domain is very tightly coupled to our web application. We want to keep the prospect of a winforms version of the application possible going forward.

I find it hard to believe we are the first people to have this sort of issue. How are you handling this problem in your applications?

Answer 1

I don’t think having your business classes rely on a global object is that great of an idea, and would avoid it if possible. You should be injecting the necessary information into them – this makes them much more testable and scalable.

So rather than passing a Session object directly to them, you should wrap up the information access methods that you need into a repository class. Your business layer can use the repository class as a data source (call GetUser() on it, for example), and the repository for your web app can use session to retrieve the requested information (return _session.User.Identity).

When porting it to winforms, simply implement the repository interface with a new winform-centric class (i.e. GetUser() returns the windows version of the user principal).