Can I reuse a Transaction? and how?

Question

I must use a corporate class that re-uses or re-creates a transaction after every Commit() or Rollback(). This class is told to use (or not use) transactions via a Boolean ctor parameter.

I am thinking of wrapping this API to separate the transaction support (to rely explicitly on Transaction objects or the ambient TransactionScope). But this requires a transaction class that is re-usable. Is there any such class in .NET? Or how would I begin to develop my own?

Answer 1

No, transactions are not reusable once committed or rolledback (and I believe attempting to access them once they've been committed or rolledback will throw an exception).

My advice would be to forget trying to create a wrapper for TransactionScope, as it doesn't really provide any value since the TransactionScope model is implicit to begin with (and it's its own wrapper). Just throw your using (TransactionScope ts = new TransactionScope()) statements around things that need to be transactioned. With TransactionScope, every database call has implied transaction support.

Answer 2

Write a wrapper method like so

TransactionScope GetTransaction(bool useTransaction)
{
   if (useTransaction)
   {
      return new TransactionScope( /* ... */ );
   }
   return null;
}

Using-Blocks will happily work with null-References so you could then write your code like this (where "useTransaction" is the boolean parameter you give to your class):

using (var scope = GetTransaction(useTransaction))
{
   // Code here (if useTransaction == true will use the ambient Transaction,
   // otherwhise will not run inside a transaction).

   if (scope != null)
   {
      scope.Complete();
   }
}

Answer 3

Update: The Session type has a separate non-transacted "acknowledge"-based behavior. I can individually acknowledge messages that I have finished processing. This allows me to avoid a Session-lifetime-based Transaction.