Ensure NHibernate SessionFactory is only created once

Question

I have written an NHibernateSessionFactory class which holds a static Nhibernate ISessionFactory. This is used to make sure we only have one session factory, and the first t

Answer 1

I solved this using a Mutex when creating the SessionFactory. Does this look reasonable:

public class NhibernateSessionFactory : INhibernateSessionFactory
{
    private static ISessionFactory _sessionFactory;
    private static Mutex _mutex = new Mutex();  // <-- Added

    public ISession OpenSession()
    {
        if (_sessionFactory == null)
        {
            _mutex.WaitOne();              // <-- Added
            if (_sessionFactory == null)   // <-- Added
            {                              // <-- Added
                var cfg = Fluently.Configure().
                    Database(SQLiteConfiguration.Standard.ShowSql().UsingFile("Foo.db")).
                    Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.AddFromAssemblyOf<MappingsPersistenceModel>());
                _sessionFactory = cfg.BuildSessionFactory();
                BuildSchema(cfg);
            }                              // <-- Added
            _mutex.ReleaseMutex();         // <-- Added

        }
        return _sessionFactory.OpenSession();
    }

    private static void BuildSchema(FluentConfiguration configuration)
    {
        var sessionSource = new SessionSource(configuration);
        var session = sessionSource.CreateSession();
        sessionSource.BuildSchema(session);            
    }
}

Seems to work like a charm. But should I use lock instead?

Answer 2

The sessionFactory must be a thread-safe singleton.

A common pattern in Java is to build the sessionFactory in a static initializer. See HibernateUtil. You can do the same in C#.

There are other patterns to implement singleton, including the usage of lock or synchronized sections. Here is slight variant that should solve your problem if I understood it correctly.

static readonly object factorylock = new object();

public ISession OpenSession()
{
    lock (factorylock)
    {
       if (_sessionFactory == null)
       {
            var cfg = Fluently.Configure().
               Database(SQLiteConfiguration.Standard.ShowSql().UsingFile("Foo.db")).
               Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.AddFromAssemblyOf<MappingsPersistenceModel>());
            _sessionFactory = cfg.BuildSessionFactory();
            BuildSchema(cfg);
        }
    }
    return _sessionFactory.OpenSession();
}