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Managing Automatic Transactions in COM+

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In the COM+ programming model, you can design your components to do what they do best—enabling business logic or establishing a database connection—and rely on the transaction processing framework of Microsoft Windows to automate transactions.

Starting a Transaction

COM+ automatically begins a transaction when it encounters either of the following conditions:

  • When a non-transactional client calls a component that requires a transaction or requires a new transaction.
  • When a transactional client calls a component that requires a new transaction.

If COM+ determines that an object should have a new transaction, it begins the transaction first and then places the object in it. The process includes the following steps:

  1. COM+ creates a context object, sets both the JIT activation and Synchronization attributes to Required, and sets the consistent and done flags to True and False, respectively.
  2. COM+ communicates with the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) to begin a transaction. The DTC coordinates the physical transaction.
  3. The DTC generates a transaction identifier and passes it back to COM+. The transaction identifier establishes a transaction boundary. All objects participating in the transaction share the same identifier.
  4. When the client creates the object, COM+ activates it within the transaction boundary.

Ending a Transaction

COM+ ends an automatic transaction by committing or aborting it when one of the following conditions occurs:

  • The root object of the transaction completes its work and COM+ releases it. After the root object deactivates, the transaction attempts to commit.
  • The client releases the root object. Without a reference, the root object deactivates and the transaction attempts to commit.
  • The transaction exceeds its time-out threshold. The transaction aborts automatically if not committed within the transaction time-out period, deactivating all objects associated with the transaction. The default transaction time-out period is 60 seconds.

Consistent and Done Flags

Speeding Transactions by Notifying the Root Object

Terminating an Automatic Transaction by Calling SetComplete