Can I make ninject instantiate postsharp aspects?

Question

I have an asp.net webapi project and I was to be able to do some aspect orientated programming on the methods within the controllers

[Audit("Getting all foos")]
public IEnumerable<Foo> GetAll()
{
    return _fooService.GetAll();
}

The aspect/attribute I've created is called Audit. I'm using ninject for object creation but elsewhere but the aspects just create themselves on their own.

This causes two problems, first I can't inject properties into the aspect so have to manually create objects within the aspect.

Secondly it is breaking my unit tests because I'm not able to override the creation behaviour of the creation of the audit aspect so a real one is created during the tests instead of a mocked one.

I don't have a lot of experience with IOC or ninject so to be honest I'm getting myself a bit mixed up.

Is there a way to force the creation of these aspects via ninject?

---

I'm using the latest version of all libraries if that helps.

I also came across Ninject Intercept but that seems more like an alternative to postsharp though I could be very wrong about that.

Answer 1

Postsharp modifies your code post compilation. There is no way Ninject can pass dependencies with this approach. But there are some things you can do:

1. Use Ninject Interception for aspects that need dependencies. This works differently. Ninject will create dynamically a decorator class and calls your aspect before and after the call. That way it can pass the aspect some dependencies.

2. Aspects are usually used for cross cutting concerns. In these situations it is perfectly reasonable to create an ambient context for the dependencies. This is a static class that provides just one kind of dependency e.g. an IAuditLog.

.

public static class AuditLogProvider
{
    public static AuditLog 
    {
        get { return autitLog; }
        set {
                if (this.auditLog != null) throw new InvlaidOperationExcpetion("Audit is already configured"); 
                this.auditLog = value; 
            }
    }
}

In your bootstrapper you can now initialize that ambient context:

AuditLogProvider.AutitLog = kernel.Get<IAuditLog>();