Dependency injection


In software engineering, dependency injection is a technique in which an object receives other objects that it depends on. These other objects are called dependencies. In the typical "using" relationship the receiving object is called a client and the passed object is called a service. The code that passes the service to the client can be many kinds of things and is called the injector. Instead of the client specifying which service it will use, the injector tells the client what service to use. The "injection" refers to the passing of a dependency into the object that would use it.
The service is made part of the client's state. Passing the service to the client, rather than allowing a client to build or find the service, is the fundamental requirement of the pattern.
The intent behind dependency injection is to achieve separation of concerns of construction and use of objects. This can increase readability and code reuse.
Dependency injection is one form of the broader technique of inversion of control. A client who wants to call some services should not have to know how to construct those services. Instead, the client delegates the responsibility of providing its services to external code. The client is not allowed to call the injector code; it is the injector that constructs the services. The injector then injects the services into the client which might already exist or may also be constructed by the injector. The client then uses the services. This means the client does not need to know about the injector, how to construct the services, or even which actual services it is using. The client only needs to know about the intrinsic interfaces of the services because these define how the client may use the services. This separates the responsibility of "use" from the responsibility of "construction".

Intent

Dependency Injection solves problems such as:
Creating objects directly within the class is inflexible because it commits the class to particular objects and makes it impossible to change the instantiation later independently from the class. It stops the class from being reusable if other objects are required, and it makes the class hard to test because real objects can not be replaced with mock objects.
A class is no longer responsible for creating the objects it requires, and it does not have to delegate instantiation to a factory object as in the Abstract Factory design pattern.
See also the UML class and sequence diagram below.

Overview

Dependency injection separates the creation of a client's dependencies from the client's behavior, which allows program designs to be loosely coupled and to follow the dependency inversion and single responsibility principles. It directly contrasts with the service locator pattern, which allows clients to know about the system they use to find dependencies.
An injection, the basic unit of dependency injection, is not a new or a custom mechanism. It works in the same way that "parameter passing" works. Referring to "parameter passing" as an injection carries the added implication that it is being done to isolate the client from details.
An injection is also about what is in control of the passing and is independent of how the passing is accomplished, whether by passing a reference or a value.
Dependency injection involves four roles:
As an analogy,
Any object that may be used can be considered a service. Any object that uses other objects can be considered a client. The names have nothing to do with what the objects are for and everything to do with the role the objects play in any one injection.
The interfaces are the types the client expects its dependencies to be. An issue is what they make accessible. They may truly be interface types implemented by the services but also may be abstract classes or even the concrete services themselves, though this last would violate DIP and sacrifice the dynamic decoupling that enables testing. It is only required that the client does not know which they are and therefore never treats them as concrete, say by constructing or extending them.
The client should have no concrete knowledge of the specific implementation of its dependencies. It should only know the interface's name and API. As a result, the client will not need to change even if what is behind the interface changes. However, if the interface is refactored from being a class to an interface type the client will need to be recompiled. This is significant if the client and services are published separately. This unfortunate coupling is one that dependency injection cannot resolve.
The injector introduces the services into the client. Often, it also constructs the client. An injector may connect together a very complex object graph by treating an object like a client and later as a service for another client. The injector may actually be many objects working together but may not be the client. The injector may be referred to by other names such as: assembler, provider, container, factory, builder, spring, construction code, or main.
Dependency injection can be applied as a discipline, one that asks that all objects separate construction and behavior. Relying on a DI framework to perform construction can lead to forbidding the use of the new keyword, or, less strictly, only allowing direct construction of value objects.

Taxonomy

is more general than dependency injection. Put simply, IoC means letting other code call you rather than insisting on doing the calling. An example of IoC without dependency injection is the template method pattern. Here, polymorphism is achieved through subclassing, that is, inheritance.
Dependency injection implements IoC through composition so is often identical to that of the strategy pattern, but while the strategy pattern is intended for dependencies to be interchangeable throughout an object's lifetime, in dependency injection it may be that only a single instance of a dependency is used. This still achieves polymorphism, but through delegation and composition.

Dependency injection frameworks

s such as and its implementation , Spring, Guice, Play framework, , Glassfish HK2, , and Managed Extensibility Framework support dependency injection but are not required to do dependency injection.

Advantages

UML class and sequence diagram

In the above UML class diagram, the Client class
that requires ServiceA and ServiceB objects does not instantiate the ServiceA1 and ServiceB1 classes directly.
Instead, an Injector class creates the objects and injects them
into the Client, which makes the Client independent of how the objects are created.
The UML sequence diagram shows the run-time interactions: The Injector object creates the ServiceA1 and ServiceB1 objects.
Thereafter, the Injector creates the Client object
and injects the ServiceA1 and ServiceB1 objects.

Examples

Without dependency injection

In the following Java example, the Client class contains a Service member variable that is initialized by the Client constructor. The client controls which implementation of service is used and controls its construction. In this situation, the client is said to have a hard-coded dependency on ExampleService.

// An example without dependency injection
public class Client

Dependency injection is an alternative technique to initialize the member variable rather than explicitly creating a service object as shown above. We can adjust this example using the various techniques described and illustrated in the subsections below.

Types of dependency injection

There are at least three ways a client object can receive a reference to an external module:
;constructor injection
;setter injection
;interface injection

Other types

It is possible for DI frameworks to have other types of injection beyond those presented above.
Testing frameworks may also use other types. Some modern testing frameworks do not even require that clients actively accept dependency injection thus making legacy code testable. In particular, in the Java language it is possible to use reflection to make private attributes public when testing and thus accept injections by assignment.
Some attempts at Inversion of Control do not provide full removal of dependency, but instead simply substitute one form of dependency for another. As a rule of thumb, if a programmer can look at nothing but the client code and tell what framework is being used, then the client has a hard-coded dependency on the framework.

Constructor injection

This method requires the client to provide a parameter in a constructor for the dependency.

// Constructor
Client

Setter injection

This method requires the client to provide a setter method for the dependency.

// Setter method
public void setService

Interface injection

This is simply the client publishing a role interface to the setter methods of the client's dependencies. It can be used to establish how the injector should talk to the client when injecting dependencies.

// Service setter interface.
public interface ServiceSetter
// Client class
public class Client implements ServiceSetter

Constructor injection comparison

Preferred when all dependencies can be constructed first because it can be used to ensure the client object is always in a valid state, as opposed to having some of its dependency references be null. However, on its own, it lacks the flexibility to have its dependencies changed later. This can be a first step towards making the client immutable and therefore thread safe.

// Constructor
Client

Setter injection comparison

Requires the client to provide a setter method for each dependency. This gives the freedom to manipulate the state of the dependency references at any time. This offers flexibility, but if there is more than one dependency to be injected, it is difficult for the client to ensure that all dependencies are injected before the client could be provided for use.

// Set the service to be used by this client
public void setService
// Set the other service to be used by this client
public void setOtherService

Because these injections happen independently there is no way to tell when the injector is finished wiring the client. A dependency can be left null simply by the injector failing to call its setter. This forces the check that injection was completed from when the client is assembled to whenever it is used.

// Set the service to be used by this client
public void setService
// Set the other service to be used by this client
public void setOtherService
// Check the service references of this client
private void validateState
// Method that uses the service references
public void doSomething

Interface injection comparison

The advantage of interface injection is that dependencies can be completely ignorant of their clients yet can still receive a reference to a new client and, using it, send a reference-to-self back to the client. In this way, the dependencies become injectors. The key is that the injecting method is provided through an interface.
An assembler is still needed to introduce the client and its dependencies. The assembler would take a reference to the client, cast it to the setter interface that sets that dependency, and pass it to that dependency object which would turn around and pass a reference-to-self back to the client.
For interface injection to have value, the dependency must do something in addition to simply passing back a reference to itself. This could be acting as a factory or sub-assembler to resolve other dependencies, thus abstracting some details from the main assembler. It could be reference-counting so that the dependency knows how many clients are using it. If the dependency maintains a collection of clients, it could later inject them all with a different instance of itself.

// Service setter interface.
public interface ServiceSetter
// Client class
public class Client implements ServiceSetter
// Injector class
public class ServiceInjector
// Service classes
public class ServiceFoo implements Service
public class ServiceBar implements Service

Assembling examples

Manually assembling in main by hand is one way of implementing dependency injection.

public class Injector

The example above constructs the object graph manually and then invokes it at one point to start it working. Important to note is that this injector is not pure. It uses one of the objects it constructs. It has a purely construction-only relationship with ExampleService but mixes construction and using of Client. This should not be common. It is, however, unavoidable. Just like object oriented software needs a non-object oriented static method like main to get started, a dependency injected object graph needs at least one entry point to get the whole thing started.
Manual construction in the main method may not be this straight forward and may involve calling builders, factories, or other construction patterns as well. This can be fairly advanced and abstract. The line is crossed from manual dependency injection to framework dependency injection once the constructing code is no longer custom to the application and is instead universal.
Frameworks like Spring can construct these same objects and wire them together before returning a reference to client. All mention of the concrete ExampleService can be moved from the code to the configuration data.

import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
public class Injector

Frameworks like Spring allow assembly details to be externalized in configuration files.
This code constructs objects and wires them together according to Beans.xml. ExampleService is still constructed even though it is only mentioned below. A long and complex object graph can be defined this way and the only class mentioned in code would be the one with the entry point method, which in this case is greet.


xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd">







In the example above Client and Service have not had to undergo any changes to be provided by spring. They are allowed to remain simple POJOs. This shows how spring can connect services and clients that are completely ignorant of its existence. This could not be said if spring annotations are added to the classes. By keeping spring specific annotations and calls from spreading out among many classes, the system stays only loosely dependent on spring. This can be important if the system intends to outlive spring.
The choice to keep POJOs pure does not come without cost. Rather than spending the effort to develop and maintain complex configuration files it is possible to simply use annotations to mark classes and let spring do the rest of the work. Resolving dependencies can be simple if they follow a convention such as matching by type or by name. This is choosing convention over configuration. It is also arguable that, when refactoring to another framework, removing framework specific annotations would be a trivial part of the task and many injection annotations are now standardized.

import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext;
public class Injector


import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
@ComponentScan
public class MyConfiguration


@Component
public class ExampleService

Assembly comparison

The different injector implementations are not that different as far as dependency injection is concerned. What makes all the difference is where they are allowed to be used. Move calls to a factory or a service locator out of the client and into main and suddenly main makes a fairly good dependency injection container.
By moving all knowledge of the injector out, a clean client, free of knowledge of the outside world, is left behind. However, any object that uses other objects can be considered a client. The object that contains main is no exception. This main object is not using dependency injection. It is actually using the service locator pattern. This can not be avoided because the choice of service implementations must be made somewhere.
Externalizing the dependencies into configuration files does not change this fact. What makes this reality part of a good design is that the service locator is not spread throughout the code base. It is confined to one place per application. This leaves the rest of the code base free to use dependency injection to make clean clients.

Dependency Injection Pattern

The examples until now have been overly simple examples about constructing a string. However, the dependency injection pattern is most useful when constructing an object graph where objects communicate via messages. Objects constructed in main will last for the life of the program. The typical pattern is to construct the graph and then call one method on one object to send the flow of control into the object graph. Just as main is the entry point to the static code, this one method is the entry point to the applications non-static code.

public static void main throws IOException
class Greeter

AngularJS example

In the AngularJS framework, there are only three ways a component can directly access its dependencies:
  1. The component can create the dependency, typically using the new operator.
  2. The component can look up the dependency, by referring to a global variable.
  3. The component can have the dependency passed to it where it is needed.
The first two options of creating or looking up dependencies are not optimal because they hard code the dependency to the component. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to modify the dependencies. This is especially problematic in tests, where it is often desirable to provide mock dependencies for test isolation.
The third option is the most viable, since it removes the responsibility of locating the dependency from the component. The dependency is simply handed to the component.

function SomeClass
SomeClass.prototype.doSomething = function

In the above example SomeClass is not concerned with creating or locating the greeter dependency, it is simply handed the greeter when it is instantiated.
This is desirable, but it puts the responsibility of getting hold of the dependency on the code that constructs SomeClass.
To manage the responsibility of dependency creation, each AngularJS application has an injector. The injector is a service locator that is responsible for construction and look-up of dependencies.
Here is an example of using the injector service:

// Provide the wiring information in a module
var myModule = angular.module;
// Teach the injector how to build a greeter service.
// greeter is dependent on the $window service.
// The greeter service is an object that
// contains a greet method.
myModule.factory;

Create a new injector that can provide components defined in the myModule module and request our greeter service from the injector..

var injector = angular.injector;
var greeter = injector.get;

Asking for dependencies solves the issue of hard coding, but it also means that the injector needs to be passed throughout the application. Passing the injector breaks the Law of Demeter. To remedy this, we use a declarative notation in our HTML templates, to hand the responsibility of creating components over to the injector, as in this example:






function MyController

When AngularJS compiles the HTML, it processes the ng-controller directive, which in turn asks the injector to create an instance of the controller and its dependencies.
injector.instantiate;
This is all done behind the scenes. Because the ng-controller defers to the injector to instantiate the class, it can satisfy all of the dependencies of MyController without the controller ever knowing about the injector. The application code simply declares the dependencies it needs, without having to deal with the injector. This setup does not break the Law of Demeter.

C#">C Sharp (programming language)">C#

Example of the Constructor injection, Setter injection and Interface injection on C#

using System;
namespace DependencyInjection