Seeking One-Size-Fits-All Context Based Storage

Question

First off, I wish context based storage was consistent across the framework!

With that said, I'm looking for an elegant solution to make these properties safe across ASP.NET, WCF and any other multithreaded .NET code. The properties are located in some low-level tracing helpers (these are exposed via methods if you're wondering why they're internal).

I'd rather not have a dependency on unneeded assemblies (like System.Web, etc). I don't want to require anyone using this code to configure anything. I just want it to work ;) That may be too tall of an order though...

Anyone have any tricks up their sleeves? (I've seen Spring's implementation)

    internal static string CurrentInstance
    {
        get
        {
            return CallContext.LogicalGetData(currentInstanceSlotName) as string;
        }
        set
        {
            CallContext.LogicalSetData(currentInstanceSlotName, value);
        }
    }

    internal static Stack<ActivityState> AmbientActivityId
    {
        get
        {
            Stack<ActivityState> stack = CallContext.LogicalGetData(ambientActivityStateSlotName) as Stack<ActivityState>;
            if (stack == null)
            {
                stack = new Stack<ActivityState>();
                CallContext.LogicalSetData(ambientActivityStateSlotName, stack);
            }

            return stack;
        }
    }

Update

By safe I do not mean synchronized. Background on the issue here

Answer 1

Here is a link to (at least part of) NHibernate's "context" implementation:

https://nhibernate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nhibernate/trunk/nhibernate/src/NHibernate/Context/

It is not clear to me exactly where or how this comes into play in the context of NHibernate. That is, if I wanted to store some values in "the context" would I get "the context" from NHibernate and add my values? I don't use NHibernate, so I don't really know.

I suppose that you could look and determine for yourself if this kind of implementation would be useful to you. Apparently the idea would be to inject the desired implementation, depending on the type of application (ASP.NET, WCF, etc). That probably implies some configuration (maybe minimal if one were to use MEF to load "the" ICurrentSessionContext interface).

At any rate, I found this idea interesting when I found it some time ago while searching for information on CallContext.SetData/GetData/LogicalSetData/LogicalGetData, Thread.SetData/GetData, [ThreadStatic], etc.

Also, based on your use of CallContext.LogicalSetData rather than CallContext.SetData, I assume that you want to take advantage of the fact that information associated with the logical thread will be propagated to child threads as opposed to just wanting a "thread safe" place to store info. So, if you were to set (pr Push) the AmbientActivity in your app's startup and then not push any more activities, any subsequent threads would also be part of that same activity since data stored via LogicalSetData is inherited by child threads.

If you have learned anything in the meantime since you first asked this question I would be very interested in hearing about it. Even if you haven't, I would be interested in learning about what you are doing with the context.

At the moment, I am working on maintaining some context information for logging/tracing (similar to Trace.CorrelationManager.ActivityId and Trace.CorrelationManager.LogicalOpertionStack and log4net/NLog context support). I would like to save some context (current app, current app instance, current activity (maybe nested)) for use in an app or WCF service AND I want to propagate it "automatically" across WCF service boundaries. This is to allow logging statements logged in a central repository to be correlated by client/activity/etc. We would be able to query and correlate for all logging statements by a specific instance of a specific application. The logging statements could have been generated on the client or in one or more WCF services.

The WCF propagation of ActivityId is not necessarily sufficient for us because we want to propagate (or we think we do) more than just the ActivityId. Also, we want to propagate this information from Silverlight clients to WCF services and Trace.CorrelationManager is not available in Silverlight (at least not in 4.0, maybe something like it will be available in the future).

Currently I am prototyping the propagation of our "context" information using IClientMessageInspector and IDispatchMessageInspector. It looks like it will probably work ok for us.

Regarding a dependency on System.Web, the NHibernate implementation does have a "ReflectiveHttpContext" that uses reflection to access the HttpContext so there would not be a project dependency on System.Web. Obviously, System.Web would have to be available where the app is deployed if HttpContext is configured to be used.