.net - Default Transaction Timeout

Question

I used to set Transaction timeouts by using TransactionOptions.Timeout, but have decided for ease of maintenance to use the config approach:

 <system.transactions>
    <defaultSettings timeout="00:01:00" />
  </system.transactions>

Of course, after putting this in, I wanted to test it was working, so reduced the timeout to 5 seconds, then ran a test that lasted longer than this - but the transaction does not appear to abort! If I adjust the test to set TransactionOptions.Timeout to 5 seconds, the test works as expected

After Investigating I think the problem appears to relate to TransactionOptions.Timeout, even though I'm no longer using it.

I still need to use TransactionOptions so I can set IsolationLevel, but I no longer set the Timeout value, if I look at this object after I create it, the timeout value is 00:00:00, which equates to infinity. Does this mean my value set in the config file is being ignored?

To summarise:

• Is it impossible to mix the config setting, and use of TransactionOptions
• If not, is there any way to extract the config setting at runtime, and use this to set the Timeout property
• [Edit] OR Set the default isolation-level without using TransactionOptions

Answer 1

You can get the (validated) default timeout from the configuration using TransactionManager.DefaultTimeout.

TransactionOptions is a struct that encapsulates timeout and isolation level. When initializing a struct using the default constructor, it will always initialize the struct members to their default values:

TransactionOptions transactionOptions = new TransactionOptions();
transactionOptions.Timeout == default(TimeSpan); // TimeSpan.Zero
transactionOptions.IsolationLevel == default(IsolationLevel); // IsolationLevel.Serializable

If you want to specify an IsolationLevel and use the default timeout:

new TransactionOptions()
{
    IsolationLevel = IsolationLevel.Serializable, // Use whatever level you require
    Timeout = TransactionManager.DefaultTimeout
};