I was in the middle of implementing a database audit trail whereby CRUD operations performed through my controllers in my Web API project would serialize the old and new poco's and store their values for later retrieval (historical, rollback, etc...).
When I got it all working, I did not like how it made my controllers look during a POST because I ended up having to call SaveChanges()
twice, once to get the ID for the inserted entity and then again to commit the audit record which needed to know that ID.
I set out to convert the project (still in its infancy) to use sequences instead of identity columns. This has the added bonus of further abstracting me from SQL Server, though that is not really an issue, but it also allows me to reduce the number of commits and lets me pull that logic out of the controller and stuff it into my service layer which abstracts my controllers from the repositories and lets me do work like this auditing in this "shim" layer.
Once the Sequence
object was created and a stored procedure to expose it, I created the following class:
public class SequentialIdProvider : ISequentialIdProvider
{
private readonly IService<SequenceValue> _sequenceValueService;
public SequentialIdProvider(IService<SequenceValue> sequenceValueService)
{
_sequenceValueService = sequenceValueService;
}
public int GetNextId()
{
var value = _sequenceValueService.SelectQuery("GetSequenceIds @numberOfIds", new SqlParameter("numberOfIds", SqlDbType.Int) { Value = 1 }).ToList();
if (value.First() == null)
{
throw new Exception("Unable to retrieve the next id's from the sequence.");
}
return value.First().FirstValue;
}
public IList<int> GetNextIds(int numberOfIds)
{
var values = _sequenceValueService.SelectQuery("GetSequenceIds @numberOfIds", new SqlParameter("numberOfIds", SqlDbType.Int) { Value = numberOfIds }).ToList();
if (values.First() == null)
{
throw new Exception("Unable to retrieve the next id's from the sequence.");
}
var list = new List<int>();
for (var i = values.First().FirstValue; i <= values.First().LastValue; i++)
{
list.Add(i);
}
return list;
}
}
Which simply provides two ways to get IDs, a single and a range.
This all worked great during the first set of unit tests but as soon as I started testing it in a real world scenario, I quickly realized that a single call to GetNextId()
would return the same value for the life of that context, until SaveChanges()
is called, thus negating any real benefit.
I am not sure if there is a way around this short of creating a second context (not an option) or going old school ADO.NET and making direct SQL calls and use AutoMapper to get to the same net result. Neither of these are appeal to me so I am hoping someone else has an idea.