Tag: Unity

While working with multi-threaded applications build over a DI framework it would be extremely useful to have objects that are specific to the context of a thread. My most favorite IoC framework, Unity, provides awesome lifetime managers that can be used to handle situations like these.

Scenarios

The most common scenario where I came across this is to group application logs by a specific thread. Each thread does a specific job and I wanted to prefix specific attribute to the log. A smart lazy person would probably just start logging the thread ID. I know that is quite simple for you to understand the logs. But when a somewhat non-technical person (project managers) wish to see the logs, you might want to make the logs more meaningful.

I once worked on this application that performed a lot of calculations on separate threads. A complex calculation was forked into multiple threads. I wanted to store the output for reuse within a thread. (Lets skip the nitty-gritties of
the app). In that situation a ‘PerThreadStore’ came in extremely handy.

ThreadStatic attribute

There is a very simple way to create thread specific properties. Just use the [ThreadStatic] attribute. Quite common among the multi-threaded developers. But using this as an extension of your IoC framework makes the application quite cool to develop.

PerThreadLifetimeManager with Unity

    /// <summary>
    /// Extends the LifetimeManager to define a class that provides a lifetime per thread
    /// </summary>
    public class PerThreadLifetimeManager : LifetimeManager
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Overridden method that returns the value of the stored object
        /// </summary>
        /// <returns>The value of the object</returns>
        public override object GetValue()
        {
            return PerThreadStore.Item;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Overridden method that removes the value for the stored object
        /// </summary>
        public override void RemoveValue()
        {
            PerThreadStore.Item = null;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Overridden method that adds a value to the stored object
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="newValue">The value to be stored</param>
        public override void SetValue(object newValue)
        {
            PerThreadStore.Item = newValue;
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// A store that stores a static object that has a single value per thread
    /// </summary>
    public class PerThreadStore
    {
        [ThreadStatic]
        private static object _Item;

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets any value to be stored per thread
        /// </summary>
        public static object Item
        {
            get
            {
                return _Item;
            }
            set
            {
                _Item = value;
            }
        }
    }

Peace