Tournament – Project Setup

For the first few iterations of this project it will be based in a single Asp.Net MVC 4 Internet Web Application. This can be found through the regular File > New process in Visual Studio. I may at some point decide to break it up into different projects but at the moment I don’t see an immediate need and don’t want to over complicate it at the beginning.

Once Visual Studio has setup the project and is happy then it’s time to add in the required packages to use RavenDB. Most of the development will be done using just the client RavenDB functionality as I have a RavenDB server running locally however when I get close to deployment I will create it so that it can either run with a dedicated server instance or in an embedded way.

The NuGet packages which I have installed are the following:

<package id="RavenDB.Client" version="2.0.2261" targetFramework="net40" />
<package id="RavenDB.Client.MvcIntegration" version="2.0.2261" targetFramework="net40" />

These give us the basics required to get the data access rolling as well as a way to start profiling what is going on.

I’ve decided to go for the setup of having the DocumentStore instance setup in the Global.ascx.cs on Application_Start and then create a session on each action call via a BaseController and finalise at the end of the call of each action. After some Googling this seems to be a simple and common way to setup a RavenDB session, avoiding DRY situations and I read somewhere (can’t remember where) that creating a session is relatively inexpensive processing wise. If this changes or I find an issue with performance then I may need to come back to it.

The base controller is very simple …

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    public IDocumentSession RavenSession { get; protected set; }

    protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        RavenSession = MvcApplication.Store.OpenSession();
    }

    protected override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        if (filterContext.IsChildAction)
            return;

        using (RavenSession)
        {
            if (filterContext.Exception != null)
                return;

            if (RavenSession != null)
                RavenSession.SaveChanges();
        }
    }
}

Now we’re ready to roll!

As always you can follow the progress of the project on GitHub. Any pointers, comments, suggestions please let me know via Twitter or leave a comment on this blog.