Querying MassTransit State Machine information

Question

Is it OK to use the DbContext used by MassTransit to store the StateMachines as a regular DbContext?

In my application we want to implement the following scenario (removed validation and err handling):

• A queue request comes in through an asp.net mvc api
• The request gets published by MassTransit. The correlation id is returned as response
• The request gets split in N smaller requests
• They smaller requests get handled in parallell
• If all the smaller requests are finished the main request is handled

The progress and status of the queue request should be queryable through the api.

If I read the docs correctly this is what StateMachine and Saga are used for. The saga is working and tested, but now I want to implement the part where I can query the state information.

Should I use the EFCore DbContext that is used as persistance for MassTransit as a regular DbContext?
Is there an existing way to better communicate this data store is not for writing outside masstransit? Is there a better way to interrogate a StateMachine or Saga?

Answer 1

A DbContext is just that, there isn't anything special about it. So, you can certainly use it to query status. There are also other options to query status from a saga state machine using request/response. Various examples cover these details.

From your description, I'd suggest looking at Sample-Batch which seems to do something similar to what you're trying to accomplish.