Mikro-orm inter-service transactions in NestJS

Question

I am evaluating Mikro-Orm for a future project. There are several questions I either could not find an answer in the docs or did not fully understand them.

Let me describe a minimal complex example (NestJS): I have an order processing system with two entities: Orders and Invoices as well as a counter table for sequential invoice numbers (legal requirement). It's important to mention, that the OrderService create method is not always called by a controller, but also via crobjob/queue system. My questions is about the use case of creating a new order:

class OrderService {
    async createNewOrder(orderDto) {
        const order = new Order();
        order.customer = orderDto.customer;
        order.items = orderDto.items;

        const invoice = await this.InvoiceService.createInvoice(orderDto.items);
        order.invoice = invoice;

        await order.persistAndFlush();

        return order
    }
}

class InvoiceService {
    async create(items): Invoice {
        const invoice = new Invoice();

        invoice.number = await this.InvoiceNumberService.getNextInSequence();

        // the next two lines are external apis, if they throw, the whole transaction should roll back
        const pdf = await this.PdfCreator.createPdf(invoice);
        const upload = await s3Api.uplpad(pdf);

        return invoice;
    }
}

class InvoiceNumberService {
  async getNextInSequence(): number {
      return await db.collection("counter").findOneAndUpdate({ type: "INVOICE" }, { $inc: { value: 1 } });
  }
}

The whole use case of creating a new order with all subsequent service calls should happen in one Mikro-Orm transaction. So if anything throws in OrderService.createNewOrder() or one one of the subsequently called methods, the whole transaction should be rolled back.

Mikro-Orm does not allow the atomic update-increment shown in InvoiceNumberService. I can fall back to the native mongo driver. But how do I ensure the call to collection.findOneAndUpdate() shares the same transaction as the entities managed by Mikro-Orm?
Mikro-Orm needs a unique request context. In the examples for NestJS, this unique context is created at the controller level. In the example above the service methods are not necessarily called by a controller. So I would need a new context for each call to OrderService.createNewOrder() that has a lifetime scoped to the function call, correct? How can I acheive this?
How can I share the same request context between services? In the example above InvoiceService and InvoiceNumberService would need the same context as OrderService for Mikro-Orm to work properly.

user_3665878 · Answer

I will start with the bad news, mongodb transactions are not yet supported in MikroORM (athough they will land within weeks probably, already got the PoC implemented). You can subscribe here for updates: https://github.com/mikro-orm/mikro-orm/issues/34

But let me answer the rest as it will then apply:

You can use const collection = (em as EntityManager).getConnection().getCollection('counter'); to get the collection from the internal mongo connection instance. You can also use orm.em.getTransactionContext() to get the current trasaction context (currently implemented only in sql drivers, but in future this will probably return the session object in mongo).

Also note that in mongo driver, implicit transactions won't be enabled by default (it will be configurable though), so you will need to use explicit transaction demarcation via em.transactional(...).

The RequestContext helper works automatically. You just register it as a middleware (done automatically in the nestjs orm adapter) and then your request handler (route/endpoint/controller method) is ran inside a domain that shares the context. Thanks to this, all services in the DI can share singleton instances of repositories, but they will automatically pick the right context from the domain.

You basically have this automatic request context, and then you can create new (nested) contexts manually via em.transactional(...).

https://mikro-orm.io/docs/transactions/#approach-2-explicitly

Mikro-orm inter-service transactions in NestJS

1 Answers