Enable.Transactions

Sensible defaults for .NET transactions.

Transactions in .NET provide a lot of awesomeness. However, the default construction of TransactionScope is broken.

Enable.Transactions provides a wrapper around TransactionScope that ensures that transactions are generated with sensible default options. What's really neat, is that by using this library, your use of transactions can easily be unit tested!

Getting started

In order to avoid being bitten by TransactionScope's nasty default settings, replace any use of new TransactionScope() with the following:

var factory = new TransactionScopeFactory();

using (var transaction = factory.CreateTransactionScope())
{
    // Do your clever work here.

    transaction.Complete();
}

Behind the scenes, this creates a TransactionScope with the following properties:

• TransactionScopeOption = TransactionScopeOption.Required
• TransactionOptions.IsolationLevel = IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted
• TransactionOptions.Timeout = TransactionManager.DefaultTimeout
• TransactionScopeAsyncFlowOption = TransactionScopeAsyncFlowOption.Enabled

Overriding the default options

If the default options provided by TransactionScopeFactory.CreateTransactionScope() are not quite what you'd like, these can be adjusted.

In the following example, we override the default timeout, increasing this to 5 minutes.

var factory = new TransactionScopeFactory();

var options = new TransactionScopeOptions
{
    ScopeTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5)
};

using (var transaction = factory.CreateTransactionScope(options))
{
    // Do some lengthy work here.

    transaction.Complete();
}

Testing and mocking transactions

TransactionScopeFactory implements the interface ITransactionScopeFactory. The transaction scope returned by the CreateTransactionScope method on this interface in turn implements the interface ITransactionScope. This makes it a breeze to mock transactions in tests, and to use TransactionScopeFactory with your favourite Dependency Injection framework.