Collection was modified; enumeration operation may

Question

I can't get to the bottom of this error, because when the debugger is attached, it does not seem to occur. Below is the code.

This is a WCF server in a Windows service. The method NotifySubscribers is called by the service whenever there is a data event (at random intervals, but not very often - about 800 times per day).

When a Windows Forms client subscribes, the subscriber ID is added to the subscribers dictionary, and when the client unsubscribes, it is deleted from the dictionary. The error happens when (or after) a client unsubscribes. It appears that the next time the NotifySubscribers() method is called, the foreach() loop fails with the error in the subject line. The method writes the error into the application log as shown in the code below. When a debugger is attached and a client unsubscribes, the code executes fine.

Do you see a problem with this code? Do I need to make the dictionary thread-safe?

[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.Single)]
public class SubscriptionServer : ISubscriptionServer
{
    private static IDictionary<Guid, Subscriber> subscribers;

    public SubscriptionServer()
    {            
        subscribers = new Dictionary<Guid, Subscriber>();
    }

    public void NotifySubscribers(DataRecord sr)
    {
        foreach(Subscriber s in subscribers.Values)
        {
            try
            {
                s.Callback.SignalData(sr);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                DCS.WriteToApplicationLog(e.Message, 
                  System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType.Error);

                UnsubscribeEvent(s.ClientId);
            }
        }
    }


    public Guid SubscribeEvent(string clientDescription)
    {
        Subscriber subscriber = new Subscriber();
        subscriber.Callback = OperationContext.Current.
                GetCallbackChannel<IDCSCallback>();

        subscribers.Add(subscriber.ClientId, subscriber);

        return subscriber.ClientId;
    }


    public void UnsubscribeEvent(Guid clientId)
    {
        try
        {
            subscribers.Remove(clientId);
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Unsubscribe Error " + 
                    e.Message);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Actually the problem seems to me that you are removing elements from the list and expecting to continue to read the list as if nothing had happened.

What you really need to do is to start from the end and back to the begining. Even if you remove elements from the list you will be able to continue reading it.

Answer 2

You can copy subscribers dictionary object to a same type of temporary dictionary object and then iterate the temporary dictionary object using foreach loop.

Answer 3

InvalidOperationException- An InvalidOperationException has occurred. It reports a "collection was modified" in a foreach-loop

Use break statement, Once the object is removed.

ex:

ArrayList list = new ArrayList(); 

foreach (var item in list)
{
    if(condition)
    {
        list.remove(item);
        break;
    }
}

Answer 4

There is one link where it elaborated very well & solution is also given. Try it if you got proper solution please post here so other can understand. Given solution is ok then like the post so other can try these solution.

for you reference original link :- https://bensonxion.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/serializing-an-ienumerable-produces-collection-was-modified-enumeration-operation-may-not-execute/

When we use .Net Serialization classes to serialize an object where its definition contains an Enumerable type, i.e. collection, you will be easily getting InvalidOperationException saying "Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute" where your coding is under multi-thread scenarios. The bottom cause is that serialization classes will iterate through collection via enumerator, as such, problem goes to trying to iterate through a collection while modifying it.

First solution, we can simply use lock as a synchronization solution to ensure that the operation to the List object can only be executed from one thread at a time. Obviously, you will get performance penalty that if you want to serialize a collection of that object, then for each of them, the lock will be applied.

Well, .Net 4.0 which makes dealing with multi-threading scenarios handy. for this serializing Collection field problem, I found we can just take benefit from ConcurrentQueue(Check MSDN)class, which is a thread-safe and FIFO collection and makes code lock-free.

Using this class, in its simplicity, the stuff you need to modify for your code are replacing Collection type with it, use Enqueue to add an element to the end of ConcurrentQueue, remove those lock code. Or, if the scenario you are working on do require collection stuff like List, you will need a few more code to adapt ConcurrentQueue into your fields.

BTW, ConcurrentQueue doesnât have a Clear method due to underlying algorithm which doesnât permit atomically clearing of the collection. so you have to do it yourself, the fastest way is to re-create a new empty ConcurrentQueue for a replacement.

Answer 5

I had the same issue, and it was solved when I used a for loop instead of foreach.

// foreach (var item in itemsToBeLast)
for (int i = 0; i < itemsToBeLast.Count; i++)
{
    var matchingItem = itemsToBeLast.FirstOrDefault(item => item.Detach);

   if (matchingItem != null)
   {
      itemsToBeLast.Remove(matchingItem);
      continue;
   }
   allItems.Add(itemsToBeLast[i]);// (attachDetachItem);
}

Answer 6

Note: In general .Net collections do not support being enumerated and modified at the same time. If you try to modifies the collection list while you are in the middle of enumerating it it will raise an exception.

So the issue behind this error is, we can not modify the list/dictionary while we are looping through. But if we iterate a dictionary using a temp list of its keys, in parallel we can modify the dictionary object, because now we are not iterating the dictionary(and iterating its key collection).

sample:

//get key collection from dictionary into a list to loop through
List<int> keys = new List<int>(Dictionary.Keys);

// iterating key collection using simple for-each loop
foreach (int key in keys)
{
  // Now we can perform any modification with values of dictionary.
  Dictionary[key] = Dictionary[key] - 1;
}

Here is a blog post about this solution.

And for a deep dive in stackoverflow: Why this error occurs?