We are currently using Autofac as our chosen IoC container. All application code in our reusable assemblies must be kept as clean as possible, so we do not want any direct dependencies on Autofac in our core application. The only place where Autofac is permitted is in the composition root / bootstrappers, where components are registered and wired up. Applications rely on dependency injection to create the required object graphs.
As we are keeping our core application container agnostic, it means that we cannot use the Autofac relationship types, such as Owned, in our core application.
I would like to create a factory that returns components that implement IDisposable. As Autofac tracks disposable objects, I believe I have to use a lifetime scope to create a defined unit of work in which components will be disposed once they go out of scope.
According to the Autofac documentation, this can be achieved by taking a dependency on Func<Owned<T>>, however, as stated above, I cannot take a dependency on Owned as it is an Autofac type. At the bottom of this page, it says
The custom relationship types in Autofac don’t force you to bind your application more tightly to Autofac. They give you a programming model for container configuration that is consistent with the way you write other components (vs. having to know a lot of specific container extension points and APIs that also potentially centralise your configuration.)
For example, you can still create a custom ITaskFactory in your core model, but provide an AutofacTaskFactory implementation based on Func<Owned<T>> if that is desirable.
It is this implementation of ITaskFactory that I believe I need to implement, but I cannot find any examples.
I would be very grateful if someone could provide such an example.
Probably the best "real-world" example of this is the Autofac MVC integration mechanism. While it doesn't use Func<Owned<T>> under the covers it does show you how you might be able to implement a non-Autofac-specific mechanism to talk to Autofac under the covers.
In the MVC case, the System.Web.Mvc.IDependencyResolver is the interface and the Autofac.Integration.Mvc.AutofacDependencyResolver is the implementation. When ASP.NET MVC requests a service, it gets it from System.Web.Mvc.DependencyResolver.Current, which returns an IDependencyResolver. At app startup, that singleton gets set to the Autofac implementation.
The same principle could hold for your custom factory. While IDependencyResolver is not specific to the type it returns (it's just GetService<T>()) you could write a type-specific factory interface just as easily.
Related
In my project I using chain of responsibility designing pattern for which I need to create multiple handlers which will implement same interface. In .net application(not .net core) I would have used DI using UnityContainer where I could have resolved handlers using named parameter. But in .net core I can not do that. Now I have few options to use other DI libraries like Autofac, Structuremap or create factory method which can give me objects based on name passed. Please help me in picking right approach between these or suggest something better if available. I have not used Autofac or Structuremap so I very little idea of same. Thanks.
For the most part, all DI tools out there achieve the same thing with different APIs. These days the differences are highlighted by your needs.
StructureMap or Autofac are both good candidates. It all boils down to "flavor".
Check this article. I think is a good one. Configuration comparison dependency injection containers
Again, don't stress over them unless you need a very very specific feature form one of them.
I would do Autofac just because I haven't had the need for something else however, I would not hesitate to use StructureMap, Ninject or whatever new kid on the block is brought up.
Following the guidelines I read in:
https://www.devtrends.co.uk/blog/how-not-to-do-dependency-injection-the-static-or-singleton-container
I want to try and avoid using a service locator.
But on the other hand, I don't register all the types in the startup.cs file. I don't think this is right that all these internal types are referenced in the main startup.cs
I currently have a factory class that has a collection of builder classes.
Each builder class is in charge of creating a specific object.
I don't want to create all these builder classes in advance as I might not need to use them and creating them is a bit heavy.
I saw an example of how to achieve this in the link above. However the startup.cs class needs to know all these builders. I don't think this is appropriate, I'd rather have the factory class be the only one that is exposed to them. I was trying to understand if there is some kind of func/action method that I can inject from the startup.cs file into my factory class. This func/action will be in charge of creating/registering the builders and then I can activate this func/action within the class factory. I'd like this func/action to receive the interface/class/maybe name of the builder but using generics isn't working. I searched a lot and didn't find any solution so I assume this is not possible.
Seems I have 2 options:
1. Use service locator. This way only the factory class will know the builders. However if in the future, if I want to change the DI I need to "touch" the factory class (I'm contaminating the factory class). Wanted all the DI code to be located only in the startup.cs class.
2. Register the builders in the startup.cs but now the startup.cs is aware of the builders. This kinda couples the code, not really single role of responsibility
It would have been great to inject the factory class a func/action from the startup.cs that would do the registration but the factory class itself activates it.
Is this possible?
I want to try and avoid using a service locator
Great, because the Service Locator is an anti-patttern.
don't register all the types in the startup.cs file.
You should do your registrations in one single 'area' of your application: the start-up path. This area is commonly referred to as the Composition Root (the place where object graphs are composed).
I don't think this is right that all these internal types are referenced in the main startup.cs
No matter how you design it, the startup assembly is the most volatile part of the system and it always depends on all other assemblies in the application. Either directly or transitively (through another referenced assembly). The whole idea of Dependency Injection is to minimize the coupling between components and the way to do this is to centralize coupling by moving it to the Composition Root. By making types internal however, you are decentralizing object composition and that limits your flexability. For instance, it becomes harder to apply decorators or interceptors for those registered types and control them globally. Read this question and its two top voted answers for more information.
I don't register all the types
The concern of having a Composition Root that is too big is not a valid one. One could easily split out the Composition Root into multiple smaller functions or classes that all reside in the startup assembly. On top of that, if you read this, you'll understand that registering all types explicitly (a.k.a. "Explicit Register") is typically pointless. In that case you're probably better off in using DI without a Container (a.k.a. Pure DI). Composition Roots where all types are registered explicitly are not very maintainable. One of the areas a DI Container becomes powerful is through its batch-registration facilities. They use reflection to load and register a complete set of types in a few lines of code. The addition of new types won't cause your Composition Root to change giving you the highest amount of maintainability.
I don't want to create all these builder classes in advance as I might not need to use them and creating them is a bit heavy
Creation of instances should never be heavy. Your injection constructors should be simple and composing object graphs should be reliable. This makes building even the biggest object graphs extremely fast. Factories should be reduced to an absolute minimum.
TLDR;
Register or compose your object graphs solely in the Composition Root.
Refrain from using the Service Locator anti-pattern; Whole applications can (and should) be built purely with Constructor Injection.
Make injection constructors simple and prevent them from doing anything else than storing their incoming dependencies.
Refrain from using factories to compose services, they are not needed in most cases.
I am currently viewing multiple tutorials (and reading books) to start working with ASP.NET MVC.
I see that ninject (or similar) is widely used to implement Dependency injection and from what i understood the main issue here is resource allocation from the classes i need.
We want to be sure for example that we have only one instance of the repo object.
I need to learn first things first so i am interested in knowing how i would create an ASP.NET MVC without using DI techniques and still be correct as far as my object resources are concerned
More info:
I have made some winforms applications. These apps where using a Business Layer DLL (BLL). This BLL had access to my DAL DLL (plain ADO.NET). they are working quite well..
No i want to use the SAME BLL to MVC apps.
With injection or not?
Without injection implementation?
Do i just create the BLL object in my controller constructor and that's all?
ASP.NET MVC doesn't require you to use dependency injection at all. It will work perfectly fine if all of your controllers have default constructors. On the other hand, you will be responsible for creating the objects and managing their lifetimes. If you need to have one repository object for the application, you have to manually implement its lifecycle(using a static variable or Singleton pattern).
If you care about testing, using dependency injection will certainly help you to design more testable and reusable objects. You can easily replace the dependencies with test doubles in your test code and let DI container inject the real implementations in the runtime.
If you are sure about not using it, then make sure all of your controllers have default constructors. You don't need any configuration.
Dependency Injection is not a requirement for using ASP.net MVC. You can definitely build an MVC app without it.
Where it will come in handy is if you want to perform unit testing on your application. If you would like to unit test an action in a controller, if you have DI set up, then you can mock your dependencies that are included in the controller constructor (that DI takes care of when the app is running) and set up responses to return when they are called by the Action.
This is much harder and impractical (if not impossible) to do if you are not using Dependency Injection. In such a case, if you want to use Unit Testing, it will be very hard to write pure unit tests of your Actions, since you will have no easy way to mock your service and data access layers for your tests.
And as you wrote, the DI layer will also enable you to ensure things like having only one instance of the repository objects that you are injecting, etc.
I have an MVC application with a typical architecture...
ASP.NET MVC Controller -> Person Service -> Person Repository -> Entity Framework DB Context
I am using Castle Windsor and I can see the benefit of using this along with a ControllerFactory to create controller with the right dependencies. Using this approach the Controller gets a Service injected, which in turn knows how to construct the right Repository, which in turn knows the correct DbContext to use.
The windsor config is something like this...
dicontainer = new WindsorContainer();
dicontainer.Register(Component.For<IPersonService>().ImplementedBy<PersonService>());
dicontainer.Register(
Component.For<IPersonRepository>().UsingFactoryMethod(
() => new PersonRepository(new HrContext("connectionString"))));
It this the right way to do it? I don't like the UsingFactoryMethod, but can't think of another way.
Also, what if the Repository needed a dependency (say ILogger) that was not needed by the service layer? Does this mean I have to pass the ILogger into the service layer and not use it. This seems like a poor design. I'd appreciate some pointers here. I have read loads of articles, but not found a concrete example to verify whether I am doing this right. Thanks.
I try to avoid using factory methods (as you mentioned you felt this smelled funny). To avoid this, you could create a database session object that creates a new DbContext. Then your repositories just need to get an instance of IDbSession and use its dbContext property. Then, you can also easily control the scope of the IDbSession object (don't use singleton because it's not thread safe).
I wanted to make that point so that I could make this more important point... Make your constructors take in only objects that are registered in the DI container (no options or configurations in constructors). Options and configurations should be read/writen in classes whose sole purposes it is to read/write those values. If all classes follow this model, then your DI registration becomes easy and classes can just add whatever dependencies they need in their constructors.
If you are trying to use a third party library that has options in constructors, wrap that class in your own class that has an easy to consume constructor and uses a configuration class to read the values needed to pass to the third party library. This design also introduces a layer of abstraction between your code and the third party library which can then be used to more easily swap (or stub) third party libraries when necessary.
The examples I can find use a two layer architecture, where the controllers directly use the repository classes in the data access layer. See here or here.
Where would you register components from the data access layer if you have a service or business logic layer that uses those components? The data access layer should ideally not be referenced from the user interface layer, right? So Application_Start would not be the right place to do it.
What would be a better way?
Thank you!
Something has to know about which implementations you want to use. There's typically 3 ways to accomplish this:
at compile time which is what Autofac uses
at runtime from predefined config file which Castle Windsor can do
at runtime with a dyanamic configuartion
With Autofac you have a few choices
Wire everything together in Application_Start
Give the responsibility to another component which implements a factory pattern and registers the required components.
For #2 I would implement something like an IContainer interface so that your IoC framework is loosely coupled with your system. Then have your data access implemenations use that interface to registered the required components.