My Grails 4.0.10 app needs to call an external service. The call may take up to 3 minutes, so it has to be async'ed. After reading the doco I wrote a non-blocking service method to perform the call using a Promise without too much trouble.
The documentation describes how async outcome can be displayed.
In my case the outcome affects the database. I must create new domain objects, modify existing domain objects and persist the result in the onComplete closure. The doco is rather quiet on how to do this.
These are my assumptions about the onComplete closure. My question is: Are the assumptions valid? Is this the proper way to do it?
No injected stuff is available, neither services nor (for example) log -- things you normally expect in a service
Database logic must be enclosed first within Tenants.withId if multitenancy is used, and then within withTransaction
withTransaction is prefixed with a domain name. However, other domains may freely be manipulated and persisted in the same closure
Domain instances picked up before the async call may be attached to the current session like this instance.attach() and then modified and saved
If logging is needed, create a new log instance
Related
I've got a project written in Symfony 4 (can update to the latest version if needed). In it I have a situation similar to this:
There is a controller which sends requests to an external system. It goes through records in the DB and sends a request for every row. To do that there is an MagicApiConnector class which connects to the external system, and for every request there is a XxxRequest class (like FooRequest, BarRequest, etc).
So, something like this general:
foreach ( $allRows as $row ) {
$request = new FooRequest($row['a'], $row['b']);
$connector->send($request);
}
Now in order to do all the parameter filling magic, the requests need to access a service which is defined in Symfony's DI. The controller itself neither knows nor cares about this service, but the requests need it.
How can my request classes access this service? I don't want to set it as a dependency of the controller - I could, but it kinda seems awkward, as the controller really doesn't care about it and would only pass it through. It's an implementation detail of the request, and I feel like it shouldn't burden the users of the request with this boilerplate requirement.
Then again, sometimes you need to make a sacrifice in the name of the greater good, so perhaps this is one of those cases? It feels like I'm "going against the grain" and haven't grasped some ideological concept.
Added: OK, the full gory details, no simplification.
This all is happening in the context of two homebrew systems. Let's call them OldApp and NewApp. Both are APIs and NewApp is calling into the OldApp. The APIs are simple REST/JSON style. OldApp is not built on Symfony (mostly even doesn't use a framework), the NewApp is. My question is about NewApp.
The authentication for OldApp APIs comes in three different flavors and might get more in the future if needed (it's not yet dead!) Different API calls use different authentication methods; sometimes even the same API call can be used with different methods (depending on who is calling it). All these authentication methods are also homebrew. One uses POST fields, another uses custom HTTP headers, don't remember about the third.
Now, NewApp is being called by an Android app which is distributed to many users. Android app actually uses both NewApp and OldApp. When it calls NewApp it passes along extra HTTP headers with authentication data for OldApp (method 1). Thus NewApp can impersonate the Android app user for OldApp. In addition, NewApp also needs to use a special command of OldApp that users themselves cannot call (a question of privilege). Therefore it uses a different authentication mechanism (method 2) for that command. The parameters for that command are stored in local configuration (environment variables).
Before me, a colleague had created the scheme of a APIConnector and APICommand where you get the connector as a dependency and create command instances as needed. The connector actually performs the HTTP request; the commands tell it what POST fields and what headers to send. I wish to keep this scheme.
But now how do the different authentication mechanisms fit into this? Each command should be able to pass what it needs to the connector; and the mechanisms should be reusable for multiple commands. But one needs access to the incoming request, the other needs access to configuration parameters. And neither is instantiated through DI. How to do this elegantly?
This sounds like a job for factories.
function action(MyRequestFactory $requestFactory)
{
foreach ( $allRows as $row ) {
$request = $requestFactory->createFoo($row['a'], $row['b']);
$connector->send($request);
}
The factory itself as a service and injected into the controller as part of the normal Symfony design. Whatever additional services that are needed will be injected into the factory. The factory in turn can provide whatever services the individual requests might happen to need as it creates the request.
I'm developing an app with VS2013, using EF6.02, and Web API 2. I'm using the ASP.NET SPA template, and creating a RESTful api against an entity framework data source backed by a sql server. (In development, this resides on the SQL Server local instance.)
I've got two API methods so far (one that just reads data, one that writes data), and I'm testing them by calling them in the javascript. When I only call a single method in my script, either one works perfectly. But if I call both in script (without waiting for either's callback to fire), I get bad results and different exceptions in the debugger. Some exceptions state that the save can't be completed because there are pending transactions. Another exception stated something about a conflict with other threads. And sometimes, the read operation fails with a null pointer exception when trying to read a result set.
"New transaction is not allowed because there are other threads running in the session."
This makes me question if I'm correctly getting a new DBContext per request. My code for this looks like:
static Startup()
{
context = new Data.SqlServer.AppDbContext();
...
}
and then whenever instantiating a unit of work, I access Startup.context.
I've tried to implement the unit of work pattern, and each request shares a single UOW object which has a single DBContext object.
My question: Do I have additional responsibility to ensure that web requests "play nicely" with eachother? I hope that this is a problem that others have already dealt with. Perhaps the errors that I'm seeing are legitimate in the sense that if one user's data is being touched, it is temporarily in an invalid state and if other requests come in at that exact moment, they indeed will fail (and I should code anticipating these failures). I guess that even if each request has its own DBContext, they still share the same underlying SQL data source so perhaps that's causing issues.
I can try to put together a testcase, but I get differing behavior depending on where I put breakpoints and how long I spend on them, reaffirming to me that this is timing related.
Thanks for any help or suggestions...
-Ben
Your problem is where you are setting your context. The Startup method is for when the entire application starts, thus any request made will all use the same context. This is not a per request setup, but rather a per application setup. As to why you are getting the errors, EntityFramework is NOT thread-safe. Since IIS spawns many threads to handle concurrent request, your single context is being used across multiple threads.
As for a solution, you can look into
-Dependency Injection frameworks (such as Ninject or Unity)
-place a using statement in your UnitOfWork classes
using(var context = new Data.SqlServer.AppDbContext()){//do stuff}
-Or, I have seen instances of people creating a class that gets the context for that request and stores it in the HttpContext.Cache[] element (using a unique name so you can retrieve it in another class easily), making it so that you will reuse the same context for the same request. Something like this:
public AppDbContext GetDbContext()
{
var httpContext = HttpContext.Current;
if (httpContext == null) return new AppDbContext();
const string contextTypeKey = "AppDbContext";
if (httpContext.Items[contextTypeKey] == null)
{
httpContext.Items.Add(contextTypeKey, new AppDbContext());
}
return httpContext.Items[contextTypeKey] as AppDbContext;
}
To use the above method, make a simple call var context = GetDbContext();
Note
We have all of the above methods, but this is specifically to the third method. It seems to work well with two caveats. First, do not use this in a using statement as it will not be available to any other classes during the scope of the request (you dispose it). And secondly, ensure that you have a call on Application_EndRequest that does actually dispose of it. We saw these little buggers hanging around after the request ended in memory causing a huge spike in memory usage.
I was looking through an old project and wanted to see if anyone had a suggestion on how to hide certain methods from being called by various layers. This was a 3 tier project, webapplication -> web service -> database
In the application there is a User object for example. When a User was being updated, the webapplication would create a User object and pass it to the webservice. The webservice would use the DataAccessLayer to save the User object to the database. After looking at this I was wondering if instead I should have made a Save method in the User class. This way the service and simply call the Save on the User object which would trigger the db update.
However doing it this way would expose the Save to be called from the webapplication as well, correct? Since the webapplication also has access to the same User object.
Is there anyway around this, or is it better to avoid this altogether?
There is a separation of concerns by keepeing the User object as object that only holds data with no logic in it. you better keep it separated for the following reasons:
As you stated, it is a bad practice since the Save' functionality will be exposed to other places/classes where it is irrelevant for them (This is an important for programming generally).
Modifying the service layer - I guess you are using WCF web service as you can transfer a .NET object (c#/VB) to the service via SOAP. If you put the saving logic in the 'User' object, you can't replace it another webservice that receives a simple textual data structures like JSON or XML or simply doesn't support .NET objects.
Modifying the data storage layer - If you want, for example, to store the data inside a different place like other database such as MongoDB, RavenDB, Redis or what ever you want, you will have to reimplement each class that responsible for updating the data. This is also relevant for Unit Testing and Mocking, making them more complicated to interrogate.
We are mixing workflows, a workflow using receive activity's more at the end. But at the start we want to pass in some arguments (not using a receive activity!)
Our workflows are already being created and resumed using a dynamic endpoint with IWorkflowCreation and a class derived from WorkflowHostingEndpoint. In the OnGetCreationContext the creationgContext is filled with WorkflowArguments and the workflow runs. At a later part the receive activity's are creating a bookmark which can be resumed with a message. All seems nice.
But in a xamlx there are no WorkflowArguments, i understand why, except that i want them anyway. I though about an activity in which i can write some code to get the Arguments myself, but i do need some help here.
Or is there another way to pass along the WorkflowArguments into a xamls without using Messaging?
You can't pass arguments into a starting workflow service except through the SOAP message that starts it. But there is nothing preventing you from reading any properties in your workflow service. So it is perfectly fine to do read settings or something similar instead of passing them in at startup.
We have solved this exact situation by creating another WCF service which sits alongside our xamlx service on a slightly different url (e.g. /WorkflowMetadata) and this is where we implement a service method that returns a dictionary of string, type.
In the implementation of this service we simply read the xamlx and determine the arguments.
This is what we use to interrogate a target workflow in an activity designer when creating something like a launch-workflow activity.
Creating an activity will not work as that activity will need an instance in order to run. All you want is some metadata about the xamlx service. And if you are using a WorkflowCreationEndpoint to construct a creation context then you are probably only allowing a dictionary of string, object as the start parameters. Therefore standard metadata will not work. This left us with the only option being to provide another service beside the workflow which serves metadata.
Background here: http://blog.petegoo.com/index.php/2011/09/02/building-an-enterprise-workflow-system-with-wf4/
I have a app that pass through a web service to access data in database.
For performance purpose, I store all apps parameters in cache, otherwise I would call the web service on each page requests.
Some examples of these parameters are the number of search result to display, or wich info should be displayed or not.
The parameters are stored in database because they are edited through a windows management application.
So here comes my question, since these parameters don't have to expire (I store them for a couple of hours), would it be more efficent to store them in a static variable, like a singleton?
What do you think?
I don't think there'd be a noticeable performance difference in storing your parameters in the HttpCache versus a Singleton object. Either way, you need to load the parameters when the app starts up.
The advantage of using the HttpCache is that it is already built to handle an expiration and refresh, which I assume you would want. If you never want to refresh the parameters, then I suppose you could use a Singleton due to the simplicity.
The advantage of building your own custom class is that you can get some static typing for your parameters, since everything you fetch from HttpCache will be an object. However, it would be trivial to build your own wrapper for the HttpCache that will return a strongly typed object.