Unit of Work

Transactional updates using the Unit of Work pattern in Umbraco Commerce.

Unit of Work

When working with Umbraco Commerce's API it is important that data integrity is maintained should any errors occur. In order to achieve this Umbraco Commerce uses the Unit of Work pattern to effectively create a transaction that wraps around sections of your code ensuring that all Umbraco Commerce write operations that occur within that code block must succeed and be persisted in their entirety, otherwise, none of them should, and the database should rollback to its state prior to when those changes were made.

Creating a Unit of Work

Creating a unit of work will require access to Umbraco Commerce's IUnitOfWorkProvider which can be injected into your Controller directly, or can also be accessed via the UoW property on the IUmbraco CommerceApi helper.

Once you have access to either of these entry points, you can define a Unit of Work as follows

_uowProvider.Execute(uow =>
{
    // Perform your write operations here

    uow.Complete();
});

The anatomy of a Unit of Work is an Execute method call on the IUnitOfWorkProvider instance which accepts a delegate function with a uow argument. Inside the delegate, we perform our tasks and confirm the Unit of Work as complete by calling uow.Complete(). If we fail to call uow.Complete() either due to forgetting to add the uow.Complete() call or due to an exception in our code, then any write operations that occur within that code block will not be persisted in the database.

Unit of Work Best Practice

When using a Unit of Work it is best practice that you should perform all write operations inside a single Unit of Work and not create individual Units of Work per write operation.

Perform all write operations in a single Unit of Work

_uowProvider.Execute(uow =>
{
    // Create a Country
    var country = Country.Create(uow, storeId, "DK", "Denmark");

    _countryService.Save(country);

    // Create a Currency
    var currency = Currency.Create(uow, storeId, "DKK", "Danish Kroner", "da-DK");

    _currencyService.Save(currency);

    uow.Complete();
});

It is not recommended to create a Unit of Work per write operation.

_uowProvider.Execute(uow =>
{
    // Create a Country
    var country = Country.Create(uow, storeId, "DK", "Denmark");

    _countryService.Save(country);

    uow.Complete();
});

_uowProvider.Execute(uow =>
{
    // Create a Currency
    var currency = Currency.Create(uow, storeId, "DKK", "Danish Kroner", "da-DK");

    _currencyService.Save(currency);

    uow.Complete();
});