C#: Can you detect whether or not the current execution context is within `lock (this)`?

Question

If I have an object that I would like to force to be accessed from within a lock, like so:

var obj = new MyObject();

lock (obj)
{
    obj.Date = DateTime.Now;
    obj.Name = "My Name";
}

Is it possible, from within the AddOne and RemoveOne functions to detect whether the current execution context is within a lock?

Something like:

Monitor.AreWeCurrentlyEnteredInto(this)

---

Edit: (for clarification of intent)

The intent here is to be able to reject any modification made outside of the lock, so that all changes to the object itself will be transactional and thread-safe. Locking on a mutex within the object itself does not ensure a transactional nature to the edits.

---

I know that it is possible to do this:

var obj = new MyObject();

obj.MonitorEnterThis();

try
{
    obj.Date = DateTime.Now;
    obj.Name = "My Name";
}
finally
{
    obj.MonitorExitThis();
}

But this would allow any other thread to call the Add/Remove functions without first calling the Enter, thereby circumventing the protection.

---

Edit 2:

Here is what I'm currently doing:

var obj = new MyObject();

using (var mylock = obj.Lock())
{
    obj.SetDate(DateTime.Now, mylock);
    obj.SetName("New Name", mylock);
}

Which is simple enough, but it has two problems:

1. I'm implementing IDisposable on the mylock object, which is a little bit of an abuse of the IDisposable interface.

2. I would like to change the SetDate and SetName functions to Properties, for clarity.

Answer 1

I don't think that's possible without tracking the state yourself (e.g. by using some kind of semaphore). But even if it were, that'd be a gross violation of encapsulation. Your methods usually shouldn't care whether or not they're executing in a particular locking context.

Answer 2

You can override AddOne and RemoveOne to take a boolean flag that is set to true if it's being called from a lock. I don't see any other way.

You can also play with the ExecutionContext class if you want to know something about the current execution context. You can get the current context by calling ExecutionContext.Capture().

Answer 3

using thread local storage you can store the entering and exiting of a lock.

Answer 4

There's no documented method of checking for this kind of condition at runtime, and if there were, I'd be suspicious of any code that used it, because any code that alters its behaviour based on the call stack would be very difficult to debug.

True ACID semantics are not trivial to implement, and I personally wouldn't try; that's what we have databases for, and you can use an in-memory database if you need the code to be fast/portable. If you just want forced-single-threaded semantics, that is a somewhat easier beast to tame, although as a disclaimer I should mention that in the long run you'd be better off simply providing atomic operations as opposed to trying to prevent multi-threaded access.

Let's suppose that you have a very good reason for wanting to do this. Here is a proof-of-concept class you could use:

public interface ILock : IDisposable
{
}

public class ThreadGuard
{
    private static readonly object SlotMarker = new Object();

    [ThreadStatic]
    private static Dictionary<Guid, object> locks;

    private Guid lockID;
    private object sync = new Object();

    public void BeginGuardedOperation()
    {
        lock (sync)
        {
            if (lockID == Guid.Empty)
                throw new InvalidOperationException("Guarded operation " +
                    "was blocked because no lock has been obtained.");
            object currentLock;
            Locks.TryGetValue(lockID, out currentLock);
            if (currentLock != SlotMarker)
            {
                throw new InvalidOperationException("Guarded operation " +
                    "was blocked because the lock was obtained on a " +
                    "different thread from the calling thread.");
            }
        }
    }

    public ILock GetLock()
    {
        lock (sync)
        {
            if (lockID != Guid.Empty)
                throw new InvalidOperationException("This instance is " +
                    "already locked.");
            lockID = Guid.NewGuid();
            Locks.Add(lockID, SlotMarker);
            return new ThreadGuardLock(this);
        }
    }

    private void ReleaseLock()
    {
        lock (sync)
        {
            if (lockID == Guid.Empty)
                throw new InvalidOperationException("This instance cannot " +
                    "be unlocked because no lock currently exists.");
            object currentLock;
            Locks.TryGetValue(lockID, out currentLock);
            if (currentLock == SlotMarker)
            {
                Locks.Remove(lockID);
                lockID = Guid.Empty;
            }
            else
                throw new InvalidOperationException("Unlock must be invoked " +
                    "from same thread that invoked Lock.");
        }
    }

    public bool IsLocked
    {
        get
        {
            lock (sync)
            {
                return (lockID != Guid.Empty);
            }
        }
    }

    protected static Dictionary<Guid, object> Locks
    {
        get
        {
            if (locks == null)
                locks = new Dictionary<Guid, object>();
            return locks;
        }
    }

    #region Lock Implementation

    class ThreadGuardLock : ILock
    {
        private ThreadGuard guard;

        public ThreadGuardLock(ThreadGuard guard)
        {
            this.guard = guard;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            guard.ReleaseLock();
        }
    }

    #endregion
}

There's a lot going on here but I'll break it down for you:

• Current locks (per thread) are held in a [ThreadStatic] field which provides type-safe, thread-local storage. The field is shared across instances of the ThreadGuard, but each instance uses its own key (Guid).

• The two main operations are GetLock, which verifies that no lock has already been taken and then adds its own lock, and ReleaseLock, which verifies that the lock exists for the current thread (because remember, locks is ThreadStatic) and removes it if that condition is met, otherwise throws an exception.

• The last operation, BeginGuardedOperation, is intended to be used by classes that own ThreadGuard instances. It's basically an assertion of sorts, it verifies that the currently-executed thread owns whichever lock is assigned to this ThreadGuard, and throws if the condition isn't met.

• There's also an ILock interface (which doesn't do anything except derive from IDisposable), and a disposable inner ThreadGuardLock to implement it, which holds a reference to the ThreadGuard that created it and calls its ReleaseLock method when disposed. Note that ReleaseLock is private, so the ThreadGuardLock.Dispose is the only public access to the release function, which is good - we only want a single point of entry for acquisition and release.

To use the ThreadGuard, you would include it in another class:

public class MyGuardedClass
{
    private int id;
    private string name;
    private ThreadGuard guard = new ThreadGuard();

    public MyGuardedClass()
    {
    }

    public ILock Lock()
    {
        return guard.GetLock();
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return string.Format("[ID: {0}, Name: {1}]", id, name);
    }

    public int ID
    {
        get { return id; }
        set
        {
            guard.BeginGuardedOperation();
            id = value;
        }
    }

    public string Name
    {
        get { return name; }
        set
        {
            guard.BeginGuardedOperation();
            name = value;
        }
    }
}

All this does is use the BeginGuardedOperation method as an assertion, as described earlier. Note that I'm not attempting to protect read-write conflicts, only multiple-write conflicts. If you want reader-writer synchronization then you'd need to either require the same lock for reading (probably not so good), use an additional lock in MyGuardedClass (the most straightforward solution) or alter the ThreadGuard to expose and acquire a true "lock" using the Monitor class (be careful).

And here's a test program to play with:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        MyGuardedClass c = new MyGuardedClass();
        RunTest(c, TestNoLock);
        RunTest(c, TestWithLock);
        RunTest(c, TestWithDisposedLock);
        RunTest(c, TestWithCrossThreading);
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    static void RunTest(MyGuardedClass c, Action<MyGuardedClass> testAction)
    {
        try
        {
            testAction(c);
            Console.WriteLine("SUCCESS: Result = {0}", c);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("FAIL: {0}", ex.Message);
        }
    }

    static void TestNoLock(MyGuardedClass c)
    {
        c.ID = 1;
        c.Name = "Test1";
    }

    static void TestWithLock(MyGuardedClass c)
    {
        using (c.Lock())
        {
            c.ID = 2;
            c.Name = "Test2";
        }
    }

    static void TestWithDisposedLock(MyGuardedClass c)
    {
        using (c.Lock())
        {
            c.ID = 3;
        }
        c.Name = "Test3";
    }

    static void TestWithCrossThreading(MyGuardedClass c)
    {
        using (c.Lock())
        {
            c.ID = 4;
            c.Name = "Test4";
            ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(s => RunTest(c, cc => cc.ID = 5));
            Thread.Sleep(2000);
        }
    }
}

As the code (hopefully) implies, only the TestWithLock method completely succeeds. The TestWithCrossThreading method partially succeeds - the worker thread fails, but the main thread has no trouble (which, again, is the desired behaviour here).

This isn't intended to be production-ready code, but it should give you the basic idea of what has to be done in order to both (a) prevent cross-thread calls and (b) allow any thread to take ownership of the object as long as nothing else is using it.

Answer 5

If your requirement is that the lock must be acquired for the duration of either method AddOne() or RemoveOne(), then why not simply acquire the lock inside each method? It shouldn't be a problem if the caller has already acquired the lock for you.

However, if your requirement is that the lock must be acquired before calling AddOne() and RemoveOne() together (because other concurrent operations performed on the instance are potentially unsafe), then maybe you should consider changing the public interface so that locking can be handled internally without concerning client code with the details.

One possible way to accomplish the later would be to provide methods for Begin- and End-Changes that have to be called before and after AddOne and RemoveOne. An exception should be raised if AddOne or RemoveOne is called outside of the Begin-End scope.

Answer 6

I ran into this same problem and created a helper class that looks like this:

public class BusyLock : IDisposable
{
    private readonly Object _lockObject = new Object();
    private int _lockCount;

    public bool IsBusy
    {
        get { return _lockCount > 0; }
    }

    public IDisposable Enter()
    {
        if (!Monitor.TryEnter(_lockObject, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0)))
            throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot begin operation as system is already busy");

        Interlocked.Increment(ref _lockCount);
        return this;
    }

    public bool TryEnter(out IDisposable busyLock)
    {
        if (Monitor.TryEnter(_lockObject))
        {
            busyLock = this;
            Interlocked.Increment(ref _lockCount);
            return true;
        }

        busyLock = null;
        return false;
    }

    #region IDisposable Members

    public void Dispose()
    {
        if (_lockCount > 0)
        {
            Monitor.Exit(_lockObject);
            Interlocked.Decrement(ref _lockCount);
        }
    }

    #endregion
}

You can then create an instance wrapped like this:

public sealed class AutomationManager
{
    private readonly BusyLock _automationLock = new BusyLock();

    public IDisposable AutomationLock
    {
        get { return _automationLock.Enter(); }
    }

    public bool IsBusy
    {
        get { return _automationLock.IsBusy; }
    }
}

And use it like this:

    public void DoSomething()
    {
        using (AutomationLock)
        {
            //Do important busy stuff here
        }
    }

For my particular case, I only wanted an enforcing lock (two threads shouldn't ever try to acquire the lock at the same time if they're well-behaved), so I throw an exception. You can easily modify it to perform more typical locking and still take advantage of the IsBusy.

Answer 7

Lets redisgn your class to make it actually work like transaction.

using (var transaction = account.BeginTransaction())
{
       transaction.Name = "blah";
       transaction.Date = DateTime.Now;
       transaction.Comit();
}

Changes will not be propagated until commit is called. In commit you can take a lock and set the properties on the target object.