How to clean-up an Entity Framework object context?
I am adding several entities to an object context.
try
{
forach (var document in documents)
{
this.Validate(document); // May throw a ValidationException.
this.objectContext.AddToDocuments(document);
}
this.objectContext.SaveChanges();
}
catch
{
// How to clean-up the object context here?
throw;
}
If some of the documents pass the the validation and one fails, all documents that passed the validation remain added to the object context. I have to clean-up the object context because it may be reused and the following can happen.
var documentA = new Document { Id = 1, Data = "ValidData" };
var documentB = new Document { Id = 2, Data = "InvalidData" };
var documentC = new Document { Id = 3, Data = "ValidData" };
try
{
// Adding document B will cause a ValidationException but only
// after document A is added to the object context.
this.DocumentStore.AddDocuments(new[] { documentA, documentB, documentC });
}
catch (ValidationException)
{
}
// Try again without the invalid document B. This causes an exception because
// of a duplicate primary key - document A with id 1 is added a second time.
this.DocumentStore.AddDocuments(new[] { documentA, documentC });
This will again add document A to the object context and in consequence SaveChanges()
will throw an exception because of a duplicate primary key.
So I have to remove all already added documents in the case of an validation error. I could of course perform the validation first and only add all documents after they have been successfully validated but sadly this does not solve the whole problem - if SaveChanges()
fails, all documents still remain added but unsaved.
I tried to detach all objects returned by
this.objectContext.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries(EntityState.Added)
but I am getting a exception stating that the object is not attached. So how do I get rid of all added but unsaved objects?
Daniel's answer worked for me, however the EntityFramework API is different in version 6+. Here is a method I added to my custom repository container that will detach all entities from the DbContext's ChangeTracker:
/// <summary>
/// Detaches all of the DbEntityEntry objects that have been added to the ChangeTracker.
/// </summary>
public void DetachAll() {
foreach (DbEntityEntry dbEntityEntry in this.Context.ChangeTracker.Entries().ToArray()) {
if (dbEntityEntry.Entity != null) {
dbEntityEntry.State = EntityState.Detached;
}
}
}
It was just a trivial bug but I am going to leave the question here - maybe it helps others.
I had the following
var objectStateEntries = this.objectContext
.ObjectStateManager
.GetObjectStateEntries(EntityState.Added);
foreach (var objectStateEntry in objectStateEntries)
{
this.objectContext.Detach(objectStateEntry);
}
while I wanted the following
foreach (var objectStateEntry in objectStateEntries)
{
this.objectContext.Detach(objectStateEntry.Entity);
}
and couldn't see it.
Since EF 5.0 use ChangeTracker.Clear()
which clears the DbContext of all tracked entities.