When working with the ObjectContext in LINQ To Entities, a lot of operations are easily performed as long as you work with the same ObjectContext instance: You can retrieve entities from storage by selecting them; update or delete these entities and create new entities, and the ObjectContext will keep track of all this for you, so the changes are correctly applied to the store when you call SaveChanges.

This is all well and good, but not particularly useful when you start working with layered applications. In this case, LINQ To Entities is just a persistence technology that you (or someone else) decided to use to implement the Data Access Layer. A few years ago, I tended to implement my Data Access Components in straight ADO.NET; and a lot of people prefer NHibernate or similar tools – but I digress…

When LINQ To Entities is just an implementation detail of a service, lifetime management becomes important, so it is commonly recommended that any ObjectContext instance is instantiated when needed and disposed immediately after use.

This means that you will have a lot of detached entities in your system. Entities are likely to be returned to the calling code as interface, and when updating, a client will simply pass a reference to some implementation of that interface.

public void CompleteAtSource(IRecord record)

Since we should always follow the Liskov Substitution Principle, we should not even try to cast the interface to an entity. Instead, we must populate a new instance of the entity in question with the correct data and save it.

That’s not hard, but since we are creating a new instance of an entity that represents data that is already in the database, we must attach it to the ObjectContext so that it can start tracking it again.

Now we are getting to the heat of the matter, because this is done with the AttachTo method, which is woefully inadequately documented.

At first, I couldn’t get it to work, and it wasn’t very apparent to me what I did wrong, so although the answer is very simple, this post might save you a bit of time.

This was my first attempt:

using (MessageEntities store = 

    new MessageEntities(this.connectionString))

{

    Message m = new Message();

    m.Id = record.Id;

    m.InputReference = record.InputReference;

    m.State = 2;

    m.Text = record.Text;

    store.AttachTo("Messages", m);

    store.SaveChanges();

}

I find this approach very intuitive: Build the entity from the input parameter’s data, attach it to the store and save the changes. Unfortunately, this approach is wrong.

What happens is that when you invoke AttachTo, the state of the entity becomes Unchanged, and thus, not updated.

The solution is so simple that I’m surprised it took me so long to arrive at it: Simply call AttachTo right after setting the Id property:

using (MessageEntities store = 

    new MessageEntities(this.connectionString))

{

    Message m = new Message();

    m.Id = record.Id;

    store.AttachTo("Messages", m);

    m.InputReference = record.InputReference;

    m.State = 2;

    m.Text = record.Text;

    store.SaveChanges();

}

You can’t invoke AttachTo before adding the Id, since this method requires that the entity has a populated EntityKey before it can be attached, but as soon as you begin updating properties after the call to AttachTo, the entity’s state changes to Modified, and SaveChanges now updates the data in the database.

That you have to follow this specific sequence when re-attaching data to the ObjectContext is poorly documented and not enforced by the API, so I thought I’d share this in case it would save someone else a bit of time.

In my Zero-Friction TDD series, I focus on establishing a set of good habits that can potentially make you more productive while writing tests TDD style. While being able to quickly write good tests is important, this is not the only quality on which you should focus.

Maintainability, not only of your production code, but also of your test code, is important, and the DRY principle is just as applicable here.

Consider a test like this:

[TestMethod]

public void SomeTestUsingConstructorToCreateSut()

{

    // Fixture setup

    MyClass sut = new MyClass();

    // Exercise system

    // ...

    // Verify outcome

    // ...

    // Teardown

}

Such a test represents an anti-pattern you can easily fall victim to. The main item of interest here is that I create the SUT using its constructor. You could say that I have hard-coded this particular constructor usage into my test.

This is not a problem if there's only one test of MyClass, but once you have many, this starts to become a drag on your ability to refactor your code.

Imagine that you want to change the constructor of MyClass from the default constructor to one that takes a dependency, like this:

public MyClass(IMyInterface dependency)

If you have many (in this case, not three, but dozens) tests using the default constructor, this simple change will force you to visit all these tests and modify them to be able to compile again.

If, instead, we use a factory to create the SUT in each test, there's a single place where we can go and update the creation logic.

[TestMethod]

public void SomeTestUsingFactoryToCreateSut()

{

    // Fixture setup

    MyClass sut = MyClassFactory.Create();

    // Exercise system

    // ...

    // Verify outcome

    // ...

    // Teardown

}

The MyClassFactory class is a test-specific helper class (more formally, it's part of our SUT API Encapsulation) that is part of the unit test project. Using this factory, we only need to modify the Create method to implement the constructor change.

internal static MyClass Create()

{

    IMyInterface fake = new FakeMyInterface();

    return new MyClass(fake);

}

Instead of having to modify many individual tests to support the signature change of the constructor, there's now one central place where we can go and do that. This pattern supports refactoring much better, so consider making this a habit of yours.

One exception to this rule concerns tests that explicitly deal with the constructor, such as this one:

[ExpectedException(typeof(ArgumentNullException))]

[TestMethod]

public void CreateWithNullMyInterfaceWillThrow()

{

    // Fixture setup

    IMyInterface nullMyInterface = null;

    // Exercise system

    new MyClass(nullMyInterface);

    // Verify outcome (expected exception)

    // Teardown

}

In a case like this, where you explicitly want to deal with the constructor in an anomalous way, I consider it reasonable to deviate from the rule of using a factory to create the SUT. Although this may result in a need to fix the SUT creation logic in more than one place, instead of only in the factory itself, it's likely to be constrained to a few places instead of dozens or more, since normally, you will only have a handful of these explicit constructor tests.

Compared to my Zero-Friction TDD tips and tricks, this particular advice has the potential to marginally slow you down. However, this investments pays off when you want to refactor your SUT's constructor, and remember that you can always just write the call to the factory and move on without implementing it right away.