Just a few words about the way that I setup Raven to be used in the MVC Music Store application before we get to the actual code.

• The model is (intentionally) very close to the one used by NHibernate. We initialize the document store in the application start.
• We then open/close the session on request boundary, and create a way to access the current session.
• If the application supported a container, I would make sure that the controllers got the session instance through that, but it doesn’t, so I just used static gateway.
  • If you don’t like, feel free to submit a patch.

public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
{
    private const string RavenSessionKey = "Raven.Session";
    private static DocumentStore _documentStore;

    protected void Application_Start()
    {
        _documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" };
        _documentStore.Initialise();

        AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

        RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
    }

    public MvcApplication()
    {
        BeginRequest += (sender, args) => HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = _documentStore.OpenSession();
        EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) =>
        {
            var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable;
            if (disposable != null)
                disposable.Dispose();
        };
    }

    public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession
    {
        get { return (IDocumentSession) HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; }
    }
}

This is pretty much it, as far as Raven’s initialization is concerned.