Questions about Entity Framework Context Lifetime

Let’s get controversial!

I disagree with the general MVC + EF consensus that keeping a context alive throughout the entire request is a good thing for a number of reasons:

Low performance increase
Do you know how expensive creating a new database context is? Well… “A DataContext is lightweight and is not expensive to create” that’s from MSDN

Get the IoC wrong and it’ll seem fine.. until you go live
If you set up your IoC container to dispose of your context for you and you get it wrong, you really really get it wrong. I’ve twice now seen massive memory leaks created from an IoC container not always disposing of a context correctly. You won’t realise you’ve set it up wrong until your servers start crumbling during normal levels of concurrent users. It won’t happen in development so do some load tests!

Accidental lazy loading
You return an IQueryable of your most recent articles so that you can list them on your homepage. One day someone else is asked to show the number of comments next to the respective article. So they add a simple bit of code to the View to show the comment count like so…

@foreach(var article in Model.Articles) {
    <div>
        <b>@article.Title</b> <span>@article.Comments.Count() comments</span>
    </div>
}

Looks fine, works fine. But actually you didn’t include the comments in your returned data so now this will make a new database call for each article in the loop. SELECT N+1 issue. 10 article = 11 database calls. Okay so the code is wrong but it is an easy mistake to make so it will happen.

You can prevent this by shutting your context down in you data layer. But won’t the code break with a NullReferenceException on the article.Comments.Count() ? Yes it will so it will force you to edit the Data layer to get the data needed for the View layer. This is how is should be.

Code smell
There is just something wrong about hitting the database from your View. You know that an IQueryable hasn’t actually hit the database yet right so forget that object. Make sure your database is hit before it leaves your data layer.

So the answer

Your code should be (in my opinion) like this

DataLayer:

public List<Article> GetArticles()
{
    List<Article> model;

    using (var context = new MyEntities())
    {
        //for an example I've assumed your "MyTable" is a table of news articles
        model = (from mt in context.Articles
                select mt).ToList();
        //data in a List<T> so the database has been hit now and data is final
    }

    return model;
}

Controller:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var model = new HomeViewModel(); //class with the bits needed for you view
    model.Articles = _dataservice.GetArticles(); //irrelevant how _dataService was intialised
    return View(model);
}

Once you have done this and understand this then perhaps you can begin experimenting with having an IoC container handle context but definitely not before. Head my warning – I’ve seen two large scale failures 🙂

But honestly do what you like, programming is fun and should be a matter of preference. I’m just telling you mine. But whatever you do, don’t start using IoC context per controller or per request just because “all the cool kids are doing it.” Do it because you really truly care about it’s benefits and understand how it’s done correctly.