My custom DbExecutionStrategy is not being called

Question

My original problem was that I was experiencing deadlocks often when updating my SQL database. Through a little bit of research, I found that I'm able to define a custom DbConfiguration and with it a DbExecutionStrategy which instructs Entity Framework to automatically retry after getting certain errors after x milliseconds and y number of times. Great!

So, following the guide at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/jj680699, I build my custom DbConfiguration, which is being used, but the associated DbExecutionStrategy seems to be ignored.

Originally, my entire DbConfiguration was being ignored, but I found that was because I was referencing it in my app.config as well as decorating my entity constructor with the DbConfigurationType attribute [DbConfigurationType(typeof(MyConfiguration))]. Now that I'm only using the app.config, at least my custom configuration is being called.

In its simplest form, my custom config looks like this:

public class MyConfiguration : DbConfiguration
{
    public MyConfiguration()
    {
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show("Hey! Here I am!"); //I threw this in just to check that I was calling the constructor. Simple breakpoints don't seem to work here.
        SetExecutionStrategy("System.Data.SqlClient", () => new MyExecutionStrategy(3, TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(500)));
    }
}

My custom DbConfiguration is referenced in my app.config like so:

<entityFramework codeConfigurationType="MyDataLayer.MyConfiguration, MyDataLayer">
    ...
</entityFramework>

My custom DbExecutionStrategy is built like so:

private class MyExecutionStrategy : DbExecutionStrategy
{
    public MyExecutionStrategy() : this(3, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2))
    {
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show($"MyExecutionStrategy instantiated through default constructor.");
    }

    public MyExecutionStrategy(int maxRetryCount, TimeSpan maxDelay) : base(maxRetryCount, maxDelay)
    {
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show($"MyExecutionStrategy instantiated through parametered constructor.");
    }

    protected override bool ShouldRetryOn(Exception ex)
    {
        System.Windows.MessageBox.Show($"Overriding ShouldRetryOn.");

        bool retry = false;

        SqlException sqlException = GetSqlException(ex);

        if (sqlException != null)
        {
            int[] errorsToRetry =
            {
                1205,  //Deadlock
                -2     //Timeout
            };

            if (sqlException.Errors.Cast<SqlError>().Any(x => errorsToRetry.Contains(x.Number)))
            {
                retry = true;
            }
        }

        if (ex is TimeoutException)
        {
            retry = true;
        }

        return retry;
    }
}

I'm not hitting anything at all in this particular piece of the code.

One thing that may be of note, is that every example I've seen so far (for example http://blog.analystcircle.com/2015/08/01/connection-resiliency-in-entity-framework-6-0-and-above/) has casted the exception in ShouldRetryOn directly to a SqlException using

SqlException sqlException = ex as SqlException;

I found that using this method always resulted in a null SqlException because my program is throwing an EntityException which can't be cast into a SqlException. My underlying SqlException is actually the inner exception of the inner exception of the EntityException. So, I put together a short recursive call to dig in and find it.

private SqlException GetSqlException(Exception ex)
{
    SqlException result = ex as SqlException;

    if (result == null && ex.InnerException != null)
        result = GetSqlException(ex.InnerException);

    return result;
}

This works properly, but the fact that I need to do it when the examples I've found don't is probably a clue as to what's going wrong. Do EntityExceptions not trigger a DbExecutionStrategy? If not, why is this listed as a solution to be used with EF 6? Any insight would be much appreciated.

EDIT: Doing some more digging into the source for DbExecutionStrategy (https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework6/blob/master/src/EntityFramework/Infrastructure/DbExecutionStrategy.cs), I've found that my recursive function to find my SqlException from the EntityException is unnecessary. DbExecutionStrategy has a function UnwrapAndHandleException which does just that and passes the SqlException on to ShouldRetryOn. So, it seems I'm right back at square one.

EDIT 2: Not really a solution, because it doesn't explain why my DbExecutionStrategy isn't being called as it should, but I have found that if I explicitly call the execution strategy, it works.

The code to use the execution strategy explicitly is:

var executionStrategy = new MyConfiguration.MyExecutionStrategy();

executionStrategy.Execute(
    () =>
    {
        //build your context and execute db functions here
        using (var context = new Entities())
        {
            ...do stuff
        }
    });

Answer 1

Probably way too old by now but in case anyone is having the same issues:

• exception.GetBaseException() gets you the root cause of any exception. No need for recursion

• I'm able to get this to work using EF 6.4.0