🚦 Event Listeners, Processors, and DbContext — Pitfalls & Best Practices - .NET 10

Here’s a short, easy-to-digest article that explains the pitfalls and best practices of mixing lifetimes in .NET dependency injection.

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🚦 Event Listeners, Processors, and DbContext — Pitfalls & Best Practices

Imagine you have two buddies in your app:

• EventListener → sits around forever, waiting for events (a singleton).
• EventProcessor → does the actual work when an event arrives.

Now the big question: what lifetime should EventProcessor have, especially if it needs a DbContext?

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❌ Pitfall: Singleton Processor + Scoped DbContext

services.AddSingleton<IEventProcessor, EventProcessor>();
services.AddDbContext<AppDbContext>();

And inside EventProcessor:

public class EventProcessor : IEventProcessor
{
    private readonly AppDbContext _db;

    public EventProcessor(AppDbContext db)
    {
        _db = db;
    }

    public Task ProcessAsync(Event evt)
    {
        _db.Events.Add(evt);
        return _db.SaveChangesAsync();
    }
}

What goes wrong?

• DbContext is scoped (new per request).
• EventProcessor is singleton (one forever).
• You end up holding onto one DbContext instance for the entire app lifetime. → That DbContext gets stale, tracks too much, and blows up with concurrency errors. → Basically, you’re trying to use a toothbrush for the whole office — gross and unsafe.

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✅ Best Practice #1: Keep Processor Singleton, Use Scope Factory

services.AddSingleton<IEventProcessor, EventProcessor>();
services.AddDbContext<AppDbContext>();

public class EventProcessor : IEventProcessor
{
    private readonly IServiceScopeFactory _scopeFactory;

    public EventProcessor(IServiceScopeFactory scopeFactory)
    {
        _scopeFactory = scopeFactory;
    }

    public async Task ProcessAsync(Event evt)
    {
        using var scope = _scopeFactory.CreateScope();
        var db = scope.ServiceProvider.GetRequiredService<AppDbContext>();

        db.Events.Add(evt);
        await db.SaveChangesAsync();
    }
}

👉 Each event gets a fresh DbContext. No stale data, no concurrency nightmares.

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✅ Best Practice #2: Make Processor Scoped

services.AddScoped<IEventProcessor, EventProcessor>();
services.AddSingleton<IEventListener, EventListener>();

And inside the listener:

public class EventListener
{
    private readonly IServiceScopeFactory _scopeFactory;

    public EventListener(IServiceScopeFactory scopeFactory)
    {
        _scopeFactory = scopeFactory;
    }

    public async Task OnEventAsync(Event evt)
    {
        using var scope = _scopeFactory.CreateScope();
        var processor = scope.ServiceProvider.GetRequiredService<IEventProcessor>();
        await processor.ProcessAsync(evt);
    }
}

👉 The listener stays singleton, but it spins up a scoped processor (and DbContext) per event.

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📝 TL;DR

• Never inject scoped services (like DbContext) directly into a singleton.
• If your processor is stateless → make it singleton.
• If it needs DbContext → either:
  • Use IServiceScopeFactory inside the singleton processor, or
  • Make the processor scoped and resolve it per event.

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Think of it like this:

• Singleton = one toothbrush for life.
• Scoped = one toothbrush per person/request.
• Transient = disposable toothbrush every time.

You wouldn’t share one toothbrush forever, right? Same rule applies to DbContext.

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