What does Kernel.Inject(instance); actually do? - ninject

I am learning to use dependency injection with ninject. Most of the properties and methods are fairly intuitive, one that has me though is Kernel.Inject(instance);
What does the Inject method actually do as it doesn't return anything. I've looked around but search for a method called inject on a dependency injection container is a nightmare, I can't find any references to the method specifically.

Kernel.Inject(instance) will inject dependencies into an already existing object.
That's why it returns void because it takes the parameter object instance and starts to investigate it's methods and property setters looking for the [Inject] attribute. Then it will call them with the resolved instances of their parameter types. (this is called Method or Property injection)
So when contructor injection is not enoughpossible you can Kernel.Inject to fill in your dependencies for a given instance.
You can read more about this here: Ninject Injection Patterns

Related

Inject IOptionsSnapshot in Block constructor

I created a new custom Block and wanted to inject an IOptionsSnapshot to read my appsettings.json values. The problem is that I get an error saying there is no parameterless constructor for my custom block.
Is there a way to somehow do this injection or is this a limitation in Piranha and custom blocks.
At the moment neither Fields nor Blocks supports parameter injection into the constructor, however Fields have two initialization methods that both support parameter injection, Init() and InitManager(). Given how models are constructed the easiest solution would probably be to add the corresponding init methods to Blocks as well.
Feel free to open an issue/feature request at the GitHub repo and we can take the discussion from there!

How to inject dependency into a JsonConverter<>?

I would like to use a JsonConverter<> which has dependency, and that dependency can not be a singleton, instead should be resolve as scoped...
I have to configure my System.Text.JsonConverter in Startup, so I must provide the JsonSerializaionOptions along with my JsonConverter<> instance in Startup. I can live together the JsonConverter<> as singleton, I instantiate myself, but how can I inject its scoped dependencies?
The only horrible thing comes in my mind to have a IServiceProvider property, and some other logic later (middleware?) checks if that property is initialized and initializes it. So in the actual Read and Write methods of the JsonConverter<> can access to the scoped dependency via the IServiceProvider.
This sounds sooo errorprone and smells, once because of timing (what is the actual conversion occurs before the property injection), but my main concern is the concurrency, having this JsonConverter<> a singleton by design, so the very same IServiceProvider instance in the injected property will be used concurrently by all the web app threads...
What am I missing here?
Is having a scoped dependency for a JsonConverter<> smells?
Is there a way to not instantiate the JsonConverter<> in Startup? (yes I know I could instantiate JsonSerializerOptions and do manually the serialization with JsonConverter), but this way I can not use many built in json support of ASP.NET Core

NHibernate and IoC IInterceptor

I have been trying to implement a solution similar to what Ayende posts in his MSDN article, Building a Desktop To-Do Application with NHibernate. Fortunately, Skooletz wrote a similar article that follows up what I am trying to accomplish with his 3 part blog post on NHibernate interceptor magic tricks (1, 2, 3). I am having trouble getting my POCO object's parametered constructor to be called by NHibernate when instantiating the object.
When I remove the protected parameterless constructor, NHibernate complains with an InvalidProxyTypeException: "The following types may not be used as proxies:
YourNamespace.YourClass: type should have a visible (public or protected) no-argument constructor". If I then add in the protected default constructor, NHibernate no longer complains, but the dependency (in the overloaded constructor) is never called causing the application to barf with a NullReferenceException at runtime when the dependency is not satisfied.
public MyClass
{
IRequiredDependency dependency;
public MyClass(IRequiredDependency dependency)
{
this.dependency = dependency;
}
protected MyClass() {}
}
I just can't seem to get NHibernate to call the overloaded constructor. Any thoughts?
In the configuration of the IoC container, you have to declare your type with the dependency in addition to the dependency itself.
container.RegisterType<IRequiredDependency, RequiredDependency>();
container.RegisterType<MyClass, MyClass>();
I missed that little tidbit from Pablo's post (where he registers the Invoice class in addition to its dependency, IInvoiceTotalCalculator) as I am using Unity instead of Windsor.
One additional note: I found is that if you would like to have any other overloaded constructors, make them internal, leave the default constructor as protected and have only a single public constructor that contains your dependencies. This tidbit helped tighten up some of my API design for the classes.

Can Ninject be instructed to apply context-based logic to all bindings?

We've begun using Dependency Injection recently, and we've chosen Ninject 2 (for now) as our IoC Container. As I refactor our solution to incorporate DI principles, I've run into something that bugs me a little, and I'm wondering if there's an easy way to get around it.
For our data layer, we have a whole bunch of data-access classes that inherit the same generic class (EntityMapper). While in the past we've always constructed a new instance of these classes when we needed one, they really could all be changed into Singletons. We've overridden ObjectDataSource to use Ninject to instantiate its data-access object, so any time we create an ObjectDataSource that points to one of our EntityMapper classes, Ninject will use its default self-binding strategy to inject the necessary dependencies. Since there are so many of these classes, we'd rather not have to create an explicit binding for each of our EntityMapper classes, and we'd rather not have to put a special attribute on every one of them either. However, I would like to be able to instruct Ninject to make any instance of EntityMapper into a singleton class. Something like this:
Bind(t => typeof(IEntityMapper).IsAssignableFrom(t)).InSingletonScope();
Is there any way to do this?
You can use the conventions extension to do the following
var kernel = new StandardKernel();
kernel.Scan( x=>
{
x.FromAssemblyContaining<MyEntityMapper>();
x.FromCallingAssembly();
x.WhereTypeInheritsFrom<IEntityMapper>();
x.InSingletonScope();
} );

Asserting a method invocation on one of several injected types

We use RhinoMocks. I have a type into whose constructor 9 types are injected. I'd like a way of automocking the type, but being able to detect a particular method invocation on one of the injected objects (i.e. I only care about a single method invocation on one of the injected objects).
Is this possible, or do I have to manually inject all the mock objects into the constructor?
I haven't seen any frameworks that would auto-create these mocks for you. You can do it in your [SetUp] method, so at least the tests will not be cluttered with boilerplate code.
I need to check out http://autofixture.codeplex.com/. Its not really container specific, there is an extension for rhino mocks. Disclaimer: I haven't tried autofixture yet.