Why I use Guids for primary keys all the time

Fabio Maulo explains and shows the difference between using Guid, Hilo and native primary keys with NHibernate and the batcher: NH2.1.0: generators behavior explained

Reallly insightful post (as always), and this one is mandatory reading if you

  1. are using NHibernate
  2. are not using NHibernate because you think you think it performs badly compared to your own hand-rolled ADO.NET data layer

I claim (without any empirical knowledge besides my own experience) that almost all db access in reality performs much better with NHibernate because of batching and futures. You CAN outperform NHibernate in synthetic benchmarks and stress tests, but for real-world usage, optimizing and doing your hand-rolled ADO.NET thing is far too cumbersome. Not using an ORM is like insisting on using assembly language instead of C# “because it’s faster”…

How to (really) implement your own ActionFilterAttribute

In ASP.NET MVC you may “tag” your actions with attributes derived from ActionFilterAttribute and automatically have their OnActionExecuting and OnActionExecuted methods called before and after the framework invokes your action, thus achieving a simple form of method interception by using attributes.

Pretty simple model, but it falls apart if you are using an IoC container to wire things up. Moreover, having application logic embedded in properties is sort of icky. It just so happens that we can solve both problems and end up with a pretty nice solution at the same time ๐Ÿ™‚

First, create the interface you wish to use to denote an action filter – e.g. something like this:

Note that I have used interfaces for the arguments. This allows us to decouple the action filter from the framework classes, thus making our stuff more easily testable.
In this example I have only put one method – ProvideViewData – on IAfterActionContext, allowing my action filters to insert additional key-value-pairs into the ViewData. More methods should of course be added if they are needed.

Then, create the actual action filter attribute, and make it accept a type as ctor argument – e.g. like this (assuming I want to resolve dependencies through the Windsor container installed as my controller factory):

And then implement the before and after argument classes – e.g. like this:

Now you may use the action filter like this:

where your IProvideProductCount will have all its dependencies automatically resolve by the container. That’s just sweet ๐Ÿ™‚

In this example I made this simple implementation:

– thus allowing any views rendered from an action tagged with [ServiceFilter(typeof(IProvideProductCount))] to show how many products we have.

If your action filter attributes need arguments, then it’s another story. I wonder how one could get around to implement that?