Category Archives: Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspect Oriented Timing in C# with Castle Windsor

I was making some refurbishments on some reporting code in our application that used EF and was suffering from the Select N+1 problem. If truth, it was much worse, as it was an Select N+1 problem up to 6 levels deep depending on where the report was run from.

I was changing the code to use a denormalized view from the database, and then run a SQL Query using Entity Framework. When doing this I was asked to get the timings of the report, both against the new way, and the existing way.

As this is incidental to what I was really trying to do, I did not want to litter timing code, and logging mechanisms into classes that already existed. This smelled of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). While I had not done anything using AOP before, I knew that it was great for cross-cutting concerns like logging, timings, etc. Having been digging into Clojure and LISP recently, this also seemed like cases of the :before, :after and :around methods in Common LISP, or the similar behavior in Eiffel as pointed out in Bertrand Meyer’s Object Oriented Software Construction, not to mention the time function in Clojure which is a function whose single concern is simply the to manage capturing the timing a function passed into it. My hope was to simplify, or un-complect, the code, and keep those concerns separate.

In our project, we have Castle Windsor setup as the IOC container, and Windsor supports a type of Aspect Oriented Programming using something called Interceptors. I found documentation on setting it up on a post by Ayende, and one Andre Loker. The issue was some of the places I wanted to setup the capturing of the timings were in different areas than where the handlers were registered for Windsor.

After some hunting around, I managed to come up with being able to add an interceptor to an already registered component by using the following line of code, where the IReportingService is the class I want to time the method calls around, and the LogTimingInterceptor is the class that captures the timing of the method call and sends it to the logger:

container.Kernel.GetHandler(typeof(IReportingService)).ComponentModel.Interceptors.Add(new InterceptorReference(typeof(LogTimingInterceptor)));

Hope someone else can find this useful,
–Proctor