Linq to Entities ObjectContext and DB connections

Question

I always have seen lots of questions about how to handle the life-cycle of an EF context, but never found a concrete answer to this.

As stated everywhere, context is intended to be used as a unit work and be disposed whenever you finish that work.

So, let's suppose in a program we create a class to manage all the tipical database tasks (create user, update user, delete user, etc..) and in each one we create a context wrapped into a using statement as is intended to be used (at least on all info I have found).

So, now, in our main program in a function we use, let's say, 3 or 4 of those functions. Does that mean we have opened and closed four connections to the database or does EF uses a pooling mechanism to reuse the same connection?

Connecting to the DB is a very consuming process (compared to execurte simple queries) and when using manually connections I tend to pool them to reuse, but with EF I am lost, don't know if I should pool contexts, pool connections and create contexts using that connections or do nothing as the EF will take care of it.

Answer 1

If all your EF instances share the same connection string, then by default it uses a connection pool. However, I would recommend you to read about the Unit of Work pattern

http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/getting-started-with-ef-5-using-mvc-4/implementing-the-repository-and-unit-of-work-patterns-in-an-asp-net-mvc-application

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/615499/Models-POCO-Entity-Framework-and-Data-Patterns