I am writing a library that will provide a collection of public types to its consumers.
I want to make types from this library dependency injection friendly. This means that every class needs to have a constructor through which it is possible to specify every single dependency of the object being initialized. I also want the library to adhere to the convention over configuration principle. This means that if a consumer wants the default behavior, he may use a parameterless constructor and the object will somehow construct the dependencies for itself.
In example (C#):
public class Samurai {
private readonly IWeapon _weapon;
// consumers will use this constructor most of the time
public Samurai() {
_weapon = ??? // get an instance of the default weapon somehow
}
// consumers will use this constructor if they want to explicitly
// configure dependencies for this instance
public Samurai(IWeapon weapon) {
_weapon = weapon;
}
}
My first solution would be to use the service locator pattern.
The code would look like this:
...
public Samurai() {
_weapon = ServiceLocator.Instance.Get<IWeapon>();
}
...
I have a problem with this, though. Service locator has been flagged as an anti-pattern (link) and I completely agree with these arguments. On the other hand, Martin Fowler advocates use of the service locator pattern exactly in this situation (library projects) (link). I want to be careful and eliminate the possible necessity to rewrite the library after it shows up that service locator really was a bad idea.
So in conclusion - do you think that service locator is fine in this scenario? Should I solve my problem in a completely different way? Any thought is welcome...
If you want to make life easier for users who are not using a DI container, you can provide default instances via a dedicated Defaults
class which has methods like this:
public virtual Samurai CreateDefaultSamurai()
{
return new Samurai(CreateDefaultWeapon());
}
public virtual IWeapon CreateDefaultWeapon()
{
return new Shuriken();
}
This way you don't need to pollute the classes themselves with default constructors, and your users aren't at risk of using those default constructors unintentionally.