ASP.net MVC Controller - Constructor usage

Question

I\'m working on an ASP.net MVC application and I have a question about using constructors for my controllers.

I\'m using Entity Framework and linq to Entities for all o

Answer 1

You are asking the right questions.

A. It is definitely not appropriate to create this dependencies inside each action method. One of the main features of MVC is the ability to separate concerns. By loading up your controller with these dependencies, you are making the controller for thick. These should be injected into the controller. There are various options for dependency injection (DI). Generally these types of objects can be either injected into the constructor or into a property. My preference is constructor injection.

B. The lifetime of these objects will be determined by the garbage collector. GC is not deterministic. So if you have objects that have connections to resource constrained services (database connections) then you may need to be sure you close those connections your self (instead of relying on dispose). Many times the 'lifetime' concerns are separated out into an inversion of control (IOC) container. There are many out there. My preference is Ninject.

C. The instantiation costs are probably minimal. The database transactions cost are where you probably want to focus your attention. There is a concept called 'unit of work' you may want to look into. Essentially, a database can handle transactions larger than just one save/update operation. Increasing the transaction size can lead to better db performance.

Hope that gets you started.

Answer 2

RCravens has some excellent insights. I'd like to show how you can implement his suggestions.

It would be good to start by defining an interface for the data access class to implement:

public interface IPostRepository 
{
    IEnumerable<Post> GetMostRecentPosts(int blogId);
}

Then implement a data class. Entity Framework contexts are cheap to build, and you can get inconsistent behavior when you don't dispose of them, so I find it's usually better to pull the data you want into memory, and then dispose the context.

public class PostRepository : IPostRepository
{
    public IEnumerable<Post> GetMostRecentPosts(int blogId)
    {
        // A using statement makes sure the context is disposed quickly.
        using(var context = new BlogContext())
        {
            return context.Posts
                .Where(p => p.UserId == userId)
                .OrderByDescending(p => p.TimeStamp)
                .Take(10)
                // ToList ensures the values are in memory before disposing the context
                .ToList(); 
        }
    }
}

Now your controller can accept one of these repositories as a constructor argument:

public class BlogController : Controller
{
    private IPostRepository _postRepository;
    public BlogController(IPostRepository postRepository)
    {
        _postRepository = postRepository;
    }

    public ActionResult Index(int blogId)
    {
        var posts = _postRepository.GetMostRecentPosts(blogId);
        var model = new PostsModel { Posts = posts };
        if(!posts.Any()) {model.Message = "This blog doesn't have any posts yet";}
        return View("Posts", model);
    }

}

MVC allows you to use your own Controller Factory in lieu of the default, so you can specify that your IoC framework like Ninject decides how Controllers are created. You can set up your injection framework to know that when you ask for an IPostRepository it should create a PostRepository object.

One big advantage of this approach is that it makes your controllers unit-testable. For example, if you want to make sure that your model gets a Message when there are no posts, you can use a mocking framework like Moq to set up a scenario where your repository returns no posts:

var repositoryMock = new Mock<IPostRepository>();
repositoryMock.Setup(r => r.GetMostRecentPosts(1))
    .Returns(Enumerable.Empty<Post>());
var controller = new BlogController(repositoryMock.Object);
var result = (ViewResult)controller.Index(1);
Assert.IsFalse(string.IsNullOrEmpty(result.Model.Message));

This makes it easy to test the specific behavior you're expecting from your controller actions, without needing to set up your database or anything special like that. Unit tests like this are easy to write, deterministic (their pass/fail status is based on the code, not the database contents), and fast (you can often run a thousand of these in a second).