I do love dependency injection, but many developers still seem to miss the point and the reason for having it. If you’re only using it on a small scale, you don’t really need any tools to use the technique. But once you’re used to this design technique, you’ll quickly start using it in many places of your code. If you do, it quickly becomes cumbersome to deal with the real instances of your runtime dependencies manually. This is where tools like Inversion Of Control (IoC) containers come in to play. There are a few solid containers available for the .NET world, and even Microsoft has released their own container. Basically, what the IoC container does for you, is take care of providing dependencies to components in a flexible and customizable way. It allows clients to remain completely oblivious to the dependencies of components they use. This makes it easy to change components without having to modify client code. Not to mention the fact that your components are a lot easier to test, since you can simply inject fake dependencies during your tests.

Lets get do to looking at a sample. Suppose we have a class called OrderRepository which exposes methods such as GetById, GetAll, FindOne, FindMany and Store. Obviously, the OrderRepository has a dependency on a class that can actually communicate with some kind of physical datastore, either a database or an xml file or whatever. Either way, it needs another object to access the Order data. Suppose we have an OrderAccessor class which implements an IOrderAccessor interface. The interface declares all the methods we need to retrieve or store our Orders. So our OrderRepository would need to communicate with an object that implements the IOrderAccessor interface. Instead of letting the OrderRepository instantiate that object itself, it will receive it as a parameter in it’s constructor:

This makes it easy to test the OrderRepository class, and it’s also easy to make it use different implementations of IOrderDataAccessor later on, should we need to. Now obviously, you really don’t want to do this when you need to instantiate the OrderRepository in your production code:

As a consumer of the OrderRepository, you shouldn’t need to know what its dependencies are and you most certainly shouldn’t need to pass the right dependencies into the constructor. Instead, you just want a valid instance of OrderRepository. You really don’t care how it was constructed, which dependencies it has and how they’re provided. You just need to be able to use it. That’s all. This is where the IoC container comes in to help you. Suppose we wrap the IoC container in a Container class that has a few static methods to help you with instantiating instances of types. We could then do this:

That would leave you with a valid OrderRepository instance… one that has a usable IOrderDataAccessor but you don’t even know about it, nor do you care how it got there. In other words, you can use the OrderRepository without knowing anything about its underlying implementation.

Let’s take a look at the implementation of the Container class:

It just uses a static instance of Windor’s Container and it registers the types we need… let’s examine the following line:

this basically sets up the container to return a new instance of OrderDataAccessor whenever an instance of IOrderDataAcessor is requested.

We still have to make sure the Windsor container knows about the OrderRepository class by adding it as a known component like this:

By doing this, the Windsor container will inspect the type (in this case, OrderRepository) and it will see that its constructor requires an IOrderDataAccessor instance. We ‘registered’ the IOrderDataAccessor type with the container to return an instance of the OrderDataAccessor type. So basically, whenever someone asks the container to return an instance of an OrderRepository class, the container knows to instantiate an OrderDataAccessor instance to pass along as the required IOrderDataAccessor object to the OrderRepository constructor.

At this point, you may be wondering: “Why go through all this trouble to register the concrete implementation of IOrderDataAccessor to be used in code? We could just as well instantiate the type ourselves!”. That’s certainly true. The code would be slightly uglier, but you’d get the same behavior. Of course, the Windsor container supports XML configuration (either in the app.config or web.config or in a custom configuration file) as well as explicit configuration through code. So you can configure the container through code explicitly, but if there is a config file present, the container will use that configuration instead of the one provided through code. So you could define the defaults in code, and should you need to change it later on, you can just provide a config file.

You know what bothers me about our current implementation? We’re still communicating with an OrderRepository instance. If we wanna be really flexible, it would be better if we were communicating with an object that implemented an IOrderRepository interface. So let’s just define the following interface:

After all, that’s all we care about as consumers of a IOrderRepository type. We shouldn’t really care about the concrete implementation. We just need an interface to program to. So let’s change the OrderRepository definition to this:

And then when we configure our IoC container we do it like this:

Now we can no longer ask the contianer for an OrderRepository interface. But we can ask for an instance that implements the IOrderRepository interface like this:

So now our client is completely decoupled from the implementation of IOrderRepository, as well as the dependencies it may or may not have.

Ok, lets suppose that this implementation makes it to the production environment. Everything’s working but for some reason, someone makes a decision to retrieve the orders from a specially prepared XML file instead of the database. Unfortunately, your OrderDataAccessor class communicates with a SQL server database. Luckily, the OrderRepository implementation doesn’t know which specific implementation of IOrderDataAccessor it’s using. We just need to make sure that every time someone needs an IOrderRepository instance, it uses the new xml-based IOrderDataAccessor implementation instead of the one we originally intended.

Because we’re using Dependency Injection and an IoC container, this only requires changing one line of code:

Actually, if we’d put the mapping between the IOrderDataAccessor type and the XmlOrderDataAccessor implementation in an xml file, we wouldn’t even have to change any code! Well, except for the XmlOrderDataAccessor implementation obviously.

We can even take this one step further… After the change to the xml-based OrderDataAccessor went successfully, they (the ‘business’) all of a sudden want to log who retrieves or saves each order for auditing purposes.

We create an implementation of IOrderRepository which keeps extensive auditing logs so they can be retrieved later on. We could just inherit from the default OrderRepository implementation and add auditing logic before each method is executed. Then we’d only have to configure our IoC container to return a different instance of the IOrderRepository type whenever someone requests it:

Again, our client code does not need to be modified in any way, yet we did modify the runtime behavior of the application. Instead of retrieving the Orders from a SQL database, it’s now retrieving them from an XML file, and the repository is performing auditing as well, without having to change any client code.

And if we were using the xml-configuration features of Windsor, we could get all of this working without even having to recompile the client-assemblies.

This was just an introduction to using an IoC contianer (Castle’s Windsor specifically) and we briefly touched on benefits that you can achieve with this way of working. The Windsor container can do much more, but you’ll either have to figure that stuff out yourself, or wait for future posts about its other features/possibilities

Original Article from Davy Brion

Dependency Injection (DI) is an incredibly useful and easy technique which makes your code a lot easier to test.

I like to use samples to explain Dependency Injection. We'll use a SqlMetaDataProvider class which needs to provide the meta data coming from a SQL Server database. It retrieves the meta data from the database in a relational structure (a DataSet) and then converts it to an easy to use object model. Obviously, i want to be able to test this class without actually going to the database because that would make the tests slow. So how can we test if the relational data is being converted to the object model without going to the database?

Well, let’s look at what the class does. First of all, it retrieves sql server meta data. Then it converts it to an object model. But retrieving the meta data doesn’t really belong here… it should be functionality that’s offered by another class. So we create a SqlDataRetriever class. All it will do is return meta data in the relational structure. Nothing more. So now, our SqlMetaDataProvider class can simply use the SqlDataRetriever class to retrieve the meta data. So basically, SqlDataRetriever is now a dependency of the SqlMetaDataProvider class because SqlMetaDataProvider is depending on SqlDataRetriever to return the relational meta data.

At this point, our class could look like this:

    public class SqlMetaDataProvider : IMetaDataProvider

    {

        private readonly string _connectionString;

        private readonly SqlDataRetriever _sqlDataRetriever;

        public SqlMetaDataProvider(string connectionString)

        {

            _connectionString = connectionString;

            _sqlDataRetriever = new SqlDataRetriever();

        }

        public MetaDataStore GetMetaDataStore()

        {

            SqlMetaData sqlMetaData = _sqlDataRetriever.GetMetaData(_connectionString);

            return ConvertToMetaDataStore(sqlMetaData);

        }

        private MetaDataStore ConvertToMetaDataStore(SqlMetaData sqlMetaData)

        {

            MetaDataStore store = new MetaDataStore();

            AddTablesToStore(sqlMetaData.TableInfo, store);

            AddColumnsToTablesInStore(sqlMetaData.ColumnInfo, store);

            CreateRelationshipsBetweenTables(sqlMetaData.RelationshipInfo, store);

            return store;

        }

    }

Note: I left out the code for the AddTablesToStore, AddColumnsToTablesInStore and CreateRelationshipsBetweenTables methods because they aren’t relevant to this specific topic.

Now we need to make sure we can replace the instance of SqlDataRetriever during testing with one we can supply ourselves. That test instance could then simply return a DataSet that was created in-memory, thus keeping our tests running fast. Notice how SqlMetaDataProvider has a reference of the type SqlDataRetriever. The type is essentially fixed, which creates a strong dependency on the SqlDataRetriever class. If we were to replace the type of the reference with an interface, it would at least make it easier to use another type for our required dependency, one that simply implements the interface.

So we create the ISqlDataRetriever interface:

    public interface ISqlDataRetriever

    {

        SqlMetaData GetMetaData(string connectionString);

    }

And then we modify the definition of SqlDataRetriever to implement the interface:

    public class SqlDataRetriever : ISqlDataRetriever

Now we need to modify our SqlMetaDataProvider class so it holds a reference to the interface type, instead of the class type:

        private readonly ISqlDataRetriever _sqlDataRetriever;

We still need to find a way to inject our dependency into our SqlMetaDataProvider so we’ll modify the constructor:

        public SqlMetaDataProvider(string connectionString, ISqlDataRetriever sqlDataRetriever)

        {

            _connectionString = connectionString;

            _sqlDataRetriever = sqlDataRetriever;

        }

The only downside to this is that it now takes more work to create an instance of SqlMetaDataProvider… work that clients shouldn’t need to do if they just want to use the default ISqlDataRetriever implementation. If you’re using an Inversion Of Control (IoC) container, you can simply request an instance of SqlMetaDataProvider and the IoC container would also create the necessary dependency for you. Using an IoC container however is outside of the scope for this post, so we won’t do that. In fact, if you know that your production code will always use the SqlDataRetriever implementation, you could also provide a simpler constructor which takes care of that for you:

        public SqlMetaDataProvider(string connectionString)

            : this(connectionString, new SqlDataRetriever()) {}

So you could use the simpler constructor in your production code, and the other one in your test code. Speaking of test code, we still need to write that test which tests the conversion without hitting the database. First, we need to create an implementation of ISqlDataRetriever which allows us to pass a DataSet to it which the ISqlDataRetriever instance should return to its consumer (our SqlMetaDataProvider):

    public class SqlDataProviderStub : ISqlDataRetriever

    {

        private SqlMetaData _sqlMetaData;

        public SqlMetaData SqlMetaData

        {

            set { _sqlMetaData = value; }

        }

        SqlMetaData ISqlDataRetriever.GetMetaData(string connectionString)

        {

            return _sqlMetaData;

        }

    }

And finally, the test:

        [Test]

        public void GetMetaDataStore_ProvideDataSetWithTwoTablesAndRelationship_MetaDataStoreIsCorrect()

        {

            SqlMetaData sqlMetaData = PrepareMetaDataSetInMemoryWithTestData();

            SqlDataProviderStub sqlDataProvider = new SqlDataProviderStub();

            sqlDataProvider.SqlMetaData = sqlMetaData;

            // pass null as the connectionString, and pass our SqlDataProviderStub

            IMetaDataProvider metaDataProvider = new SqlMetaDataProvider(null, sqlDataProvider);

            MetaDataStore store = metaDataProvider.GetMetaDataStore();

            AssertStoreContainsOurTestData(store);

        }

Original article by Davy Brion