I am new to scaldi. I have a class being used in my cloud environment configuration where I want two things to happen.
bind [EnvironmentInfo] to new EnvironmentInfo initWith(_.init())
First, I want it to be a singleton. It retrieves the runtime information (Google AppEngine in this case) and it should do this once on instantiation. It seems like initWith is a good choice.
Next, I want instantiation to be delayed until first request. Following the execution path it is being instantiated well before the first call.
If I can get delayed instantiation, then initWith should move to the class constructor.
My answer ended up being simple. I abstracted the singleton "state" and accessed it as a 'lazy val ...'.
Related
Is it a good practice to make use of singleton object to process client requests?
As object instance is singleton, and if its in middle of processing a client request , and meanwhile another request arrives then same instance is invoked with new client data. Won't it make things messy?
When using singleton objects we must ensure everything inside it as well as everything it calls must be thread-safe. For example, javax.crypto.Cipher does not seem to be thread-safe, so it should probably not be called from a singleton. Consider how guice uses #Singleton to specify threadsafety intention:
#Singleton
public class InMemoryTransactionLog implements TransactionLog {
/* everything here should be threadsafe! */
}
Also consider the example of Play Framework which starting version 2.4 began moving away from singleton controllers and started encouraging class controllers.
It depends on whether the object holds any mutable data or not.
If the object is just a holder for pure functions and immutable state, it does not matter how many threads are using it at the same time because they can't affect each other via shared state.
If the object has mutable state then things can definitely go wrong if you access it from multiple threads without some kind of locking, either inside the object or externally.
So it is good practice as long as there is no mutable state. It is a good way of collecting related methods under the same namespace, or for creating a global function (by defining an apply method).
We are using Autofac 4 for DI and I started experimenting with AI a short while ago. Now I created a IdentityTelemetryInitializer class which needs and IIdentityProvider to be able to get the ID of the current authorized user and set it add it to the context. I cannot find a way in which to inject dependencies into a TelemetryInitializer. If I define a contructor that takes an IIdentityProvider, the custom initializer is skipped altogether.
Any ideas are welcome. I was thinking of having the user ID also set as the Thread Principal so that we can access it this way, but I was hoping I could use DI for this?
You cannot inject dependencies using a constructor as the initializer initialized internally using the default (empty) constructor. When you explicitly defined a new ctor you've actually 'removed' the default one, thus the initializer was skipped altogether, as you've mentioned.
Therefore, the only way is to resolve the dependencies during the 'Initialize' method, after registering them on application startup.
ctx.RegisterType<MyService>().As<IService>().AsSelf(); // on application startup
ctx.Resolve<IService>(); // during initializer 'Initialize' method
You might look at the question I asked here
How to have "Request" events with authenticated user id ?
because I had managed to have the TelemetryInitializer working, passing user id via the HttpContext as suggested by #yonisha.
Off course it's not as lean as what you try to achieve.
The Telemetry Initializer is called each time you instanciate a Telemetry class, so really depending of how you manage them. Btw I am looking for good advice/best pratice on that : for the moment I have one private instance on each Controller that need to track something, but that does not smell good due to lifetime of Controller.
It appears that Unity IoC defaults to creating a new instance of an object when it resolves a type. But my question is there someway to be explicit and tell my container that whenever I have it resolve an object type to give me a new instance of said type?
IE i want to be explicit and force the container to make sure theInstance is a new instance each time it resolves type:MyNewObject (or all types for that matter)
MyNewObject theInstance = container.Resolve<MyNewObject>();
Yes it is easily configurable by a TransientLifetimeManager
When you register a class should have something like
container.Register<IMyNewObject, MyMewObject>(new TransientLifetimeManager());
//or
container.Register<MyMewObject>(new TransientLifetimeManager())
If you're applying IoC principles properly, your class declares its dependencies and then the container handles the lifecycles of them. For example, you want to grab an HttpRequest object and the container handles providing the current thread-local one, or whatever.
Your code shouldn't really have to care about the life-cycle of its dependencies, as it should never be responsible for clearing up after them or what-have-you (all of that should be encapsulated in the dependency itself, and invoked by the container when it is shut down).
However, if you do need to care in your code about whether you get a singleton instance or a per-injected instance of the same type, I like to be explicit about it by using the type system itself, just as the Guice container for Java does with its Provider pattern. I've created a Guice-style IProvider<T> interface that I use to do this, and I just wire it up with a simple static factory method for them like so:
Provider.Of<Foo>(() => { /* Code to return a Foo goes here */})
By my (likely meager) understanding, doing this in the middle of a method in your controller / presenter is considered bad practice, since it creates a dependency between StructureMap and your presenter:
void Override() {
ICommentForOverrideGetter comm = StructureMap.ObjectFactory.GetInstance<ICommentForOverrideGetter>();
since this dependancy should be injected into the presenter via the constructor, with your IoC container wiring it up. In this case though my code needs a fresh copy of ICommentForOverrideGetter every time this method runs. Is this an exception to the above best practice, or a case where I should re-think my architecture?
It is said that there is no problem in computer science which cannot be solved by one more level of indirection:
If you just don't want the dependency in your presenter, inject a factory interface, the real implementation could do new CommentForOverrideGetter or whatever.
Edit:
"I have no problem ignoring best practices when I think the complexity/benefit ratio is too high": Neither do I, but as I said in the comments, I don't like hard dependencies on IoC containers in code I want to unit test and presenters are such a case.
Depending on what your ICommentForOverrideGetter does, you could also use a simple CommentForOverrideGetter.CreateNew() but as you require a fresh instance per call, I'd suspect at least some kind of logic associated with the creation? Or is it a stateful "service"?
If you insist on doing service location in your method, you should at least inject the container into your controller, so that you can eliminate the static method call. Add a constructor parameter of type StructureMap.IContainer and store it in a field variable. StructureMap will inject the proper container. You can then call GetInstance() on that container, instead of ObjectFactory.
I have a question, and I'm going to tag this subjective since that's what I think it evolves into, more of a discussion. I'm hoping for some good ideas or some thought-provokers. I apologize for the long-winded question but you need to know the context.
The question is basically:
How do you deal with concrete types in relation to IoC containers? Specifically, who is responsible for disposing them, if they require disposal, and how does that knowledge get propagated out to the calling code?
Do you require them to be IDisposable? If not, is that code future-proof, or is the rule that you cannot use disposable objects? If you enforce IDisposable-requirements on interfaces and concrete types to be future-proof, whose responsibility is objects injected as part of constructor calls?
Edit: I accepted the answer by #Chris Ballard since it's the closest one to the approach we ended up with.
Basically, we always return a type that looks like this:
public interface IService<T> : IDisposable
where T: class
{
T Instance { get; }
Boolean Success { get; }
String FailureMessage { get; } // in case Success=false
}
We then return an object implementing this interface back from both .Resolve and .TryResolve, so that what we get in the calling code is always the same type.
Now, the object implementing this interface, IService<T> is IDisposable, and should always be disposed of. It's not up to the programmer that resolves a service to decide whether the IService<T> object should be disposed or not.
However, and this is the crucial part, whether the service instance should be disposed or not, that knowledge is baked into the object implementing IService<T>, so if it's a factory-scoped service (ie. each call to Resolve ends up with a new service instance), then the service instance will be disposed when the IService<T> object is disposed.
This also made it possible to support other special scopes, like pooling. We can now say that we want minimum 2 service instances, maximum 15, and typically 5, which means that each call to .Resolve will either retrieve a service instance from a pool of available objects, or construct a new one. And then, when the IService<T> object that holds the pooled service is disposed of, the service instance is released back into its pool.
Sure, this made all code look like this:
using (var service = ServiceContainer.Global.Resolve<ISomeService>())
{
service.Instance.DoSomething();
}
but it's a clean approach, and it has the same syntax regardless of the type of service or concrete object in use, so we chose that as an acceptable solution.
Original question follows, for posterity
Long-winded question comes here:
We have a IoC container that we use, and recently we discovered what amounts to a problem.
In non-IoC code, when we wanted to use, say, a file, we used a class like this:
using (Stream stream = new FileStream(...))
{
...
}
There was no question as to whether this class was something that held a limited resource or not, since we knew that files had to be closed, and the class itself implemented IDisposable. The rule is simply that every class we construct an object of, that implements IDisposable, has to be disposed of. No questions asked. It's not up to the user of this class to decide if calling Dispose is optional or not.
Ok, so on to the first step towards the IoC container. Let's assume we don't want the code to talk directly to the file, but instead go through one layer of indirection. Let's call this class a BinaryDataProvider for this example. Internally, the class is using a stream, which is still a disposable object, so the above code would be changed to:
using (BinaryDataProvider provider = new BinaryDataProvider(...))
{
...
}
This doesn't change much. The knowledge that the class implements IDisposable is still here, no questions asked, we need to call Dispose.
But, let's assume that we have classes that provide data that right now doesn't use any such limited resources.
The above code could then be written as:
BinaryDataProvider provider = new BinaryDataProvider();
...
OK, so far so good, but here comes the meat of the question. Let's assume we want to use an IoC container to inject this provider instead of depending on a specific concrete type.
The code would then be:
IBinaryDataProvider provider =
ServiceContainer.Global.Resolve<IBinaryDataProvider>();
...
Note that I assume there is an independent interface available that we can access the object through.
With the above change, what if we later on want to use an object that really should be disposed of? None of the existing code that resolves that interface is written to dispose of the object, so what now?
The way we see it, we have to pick one solution:
Implement runtime checking that checks that if a concrete type that is being registered implements IDisposable, require that the interface it is exposed through also implements IDisposable. This is not a good solution
Enfore a constraint on the interfaces being used, they must always inherit from IDisposable, in order to be future-proof
Enforce runtime that no concrete types can be IDisposable, since this is specifically not handled by the code using the IoC container
Just leave it up to the programmer to check if the object implements IDisposable and "do the right thing"?
Are there others?
Also, what about injecting objects in constructors? Our container, and some of the other containers we've looked into, is capable of injecting a fresh object into a parameter to a constructor of a concrete type. For instance, if our BinaryDataProvider need an object that implements the ILogging interface, if we enforce IDispose-"ability" on these objects, whose responsibility is it to dispose of the logging object?
What do you think? I want opinions, good and bad.
One option might be to go with a factory pattern, so that the objects created directly by the IoC container never need to be disposed themselves, eg
IBinaryDataProviderFactory factory =
ServiceContainer.Global.Resolve<IBinaryDataProviderFactory>();
using(IBinaryDataProvider provider = factory.CreateProvider())
{
...
}
Downside is added complexity, but it does mean that the container never creates anything which the developer is supposed to dispose of - it is always explicit code which does this.
If you really want to make it obvious, the factory method could be named something like CreateDisposableProvider().
(Disclaimer: I'm answering this based on java stuff. Although I program C# I haven't proxied anything in C# but I know it's possible. Sorry about the java terminology)
You could let the IoC framework inspect the object being constructed to see if it supports
IDisposable. If not, you could use a dynamic proxy to wrap the actual object that the IoC framework provides to the client code. This dynamic proxy could implement IDisposable, so that you'd always deliver a IDisposable to the client. As long as you're working with interfaces that should be fairly simple ?
Then you'd just have the problem of communicating to the developer when the object is an IDisposable. I'm not really sure how this'd be done in a nice manner.
You actually came up with a very dirty solution: your IService contract violates the SRP, wich is a big no-no.
What I recommend is to distinguish so-called "singleton" services from so-called "prototype" services. Lifetime of "singleton" ones is managed by the container, which may query at runtime whether a particular instance implements IDisposable and invoke Dispose() on shutdown if so.
Managing prototypes, on the other hand, is totally the responsibility of the calling code.