Is it a leaky abstraction if implementation of interface calls Dispose

Question

Consider this code:

public class MyClass()
{
  public MyClass()
  {    
  }

  public DoSomething()
  {
    using (var service = new CustomerCreditServiceClient())
    {
       var creditLimit = service.GetCreditLimit(
         customer.Firstname, customer.Surname, customer.DateOfBirth);       
    }
  }
}

We now want to refactor it to loosely couple it. We end up with this:

public class MyClass()
{
  private readonly ICustomerCreditService service;

  public MyClass(ICustomerCreditService service)
  {
     this.service= service;
  }

  public DoSomething()
  {
     var creditLimit = service.GetCreditLimit(
       customer.Firstname, customer.Surname, customer.DateOfBirth);       
  }
}

Looks ok right? Now any implementation can use the interface and all is good.

What if I now say that the implementation is a WCF class and that the using statement before the refactoring was done was there for a reason. ie/to close the WCF connection.

So now our interface has to implement a Dispose method call or we use a factory interface to get the implementation and put a using statement around that.

To me (although new to the subject) this seems like a leaky abstraction. We are having to put method calls in our code just for the sake of the way the implementation is handling stuff.

Could someone help me understand this and confirm whether I'm right or wrong.

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, it is a leaky abstraction when you let ICustomerCreditService implement IDisposable, since you've now written ICustomerCreditService with a specific implementation in mind. Further more, this communicates to the consumer of that interface that it could dispose that service, which might not be correct, especially since in general, a resource should be disposed by the one who creates it (who has the ownership). When you inject a resource into a class (using constructor injection for instance), it is not clear if the consumer is given the ownership.

So in general the one responsible of creating that resource should dispose it.

However, in your case, you can simply prevent this from even happening by implementing a non-disposable implementation of ICustomerCreditServiceClient that simply creates and disposes the WCF client within the same method call. This makes everything much easier:

public class WcfCustomerCreditServiceClient
    : ICustomerCreditServiceClient
{
    public CreditLimit GetCreditLimit(Customer customer)
    {
        using (var service = new CustomerCreditServiceClient())
        {
            return service.GetCreditLimit(customer.Firstname,
                customer.Surname, customer.DateOfBirth);       
        }
    }
}