Fun with constructor arguments Part 1: Pick & Choose

One of Unity’s weaknesses is the verbosity of its configuration. While other containers support developers with various built-in conventions to keep the necessary setup code as compact as possible Unity requires you to state everything you want explicitely.

Consider the following skeleton of a class definition:

public class CustomerRepository
{
  public CustomerRepository(string connectionString, ILog log, ISomethingElse else) { ... }
}

Specifying the connectionString parameter for that constructor using Unity’s standard API looks like this:

container.RegisterType<ICustomerRepository, CustomerRepository>(
  new InjectionConstructor("I'mAConnectionString", typeof(ILog), typeof(ISomethingElse)));

There are a couple of things I don’t like about this approach:

• Why do I have to write so much code to specify a single parameter?
• Why do I have to specify all parameters although I care about only one?
• Why does their order matter? Refactoring could break my registration code!
• Why do I have to find out on my own that I can provide placeholders for parameters I don’t care about by providing their type?
• Why do I have to provide those placeholders at all?

It’s all about verbosity. I don’t like to write unnecessary code. That is code I will have to write, test and maintain. The more effort I can save on that the better.

Conventions are a great means to not have to write code. They will get you 80% of the way most of the time at virtually no cost. And for the last 20% you can use the verbose API or define custom conventions that fit the special needs of your environment.

Providing a single parameter for the constructor of CustomerRepository can be as simple as this:

container.RegisterType<ICustomerRepository, CustomerRepository>(
  new SmartConstructor("I'mAConnectionString"));

What do you have to do to get that convenience? Not that much actually. SmartConstructor uses a couple of conventions to select a constructor from a set of candidates:

• Only consider constructors that accept all provided parameters
• Don’t consider constructors that have primitive parameters (like strings or integers) that are not satisfied by the provided parameters
• If the parameter you specified is a string try to match it with parameters whose names contain connectionString, file or path.
• Try to match specified parameters by parts of their type name. E.g. if you specified a parameter of type SomeTypeName a convention will look for parameters named someTypeName, typeName and name.
• From the candidates that are left take the one with the most parameters (most greedy constructor).

The matching conventions are easy to write. They derive from ParameterMatchingConvention

public abstract class ParameterMatchingConvention
{
  public bool Matches(ConstructorParameter argument, ParameterInfo parameter)
  {
    ResolvedParameter rp = argument.Value as ResolvedParameter;
    Type argumentValueType = rp != null ? rp.ParameterType : argument.Value.GetType();
    if (argument.Value != null &&
        parameter.ParameterType.IsAssignableFrom(argumentValueType))
    {
      return this.MatchesCore(argument, parameter);
    }
    return false;
  }
  protected abstract bool MatchesCore(ConstructorParameter argument, ParameterInfo parameter);
}

That base class does some validation of the input values (which is omitted for brevity in the sample) and checks wether the type of the specified parameter matches the type of the parameter it is compared against. If that’s the case it hands over to the actual implementation of the convention. The ConnectionStringMatchingConvention for example looks as simple as that:

public class ConnectionStringMatchingConvention : ParameterMatchingConvention
{
  protected override bool MatchesCore(ConstructorParameter argument, ParameterInfo parameter)
  {
    if (parameter.ParameterType == typeof(string))
    {
      return parameter.Name.Contains("connectionString", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
    }
    return false;
  }
}

Done. To add a custom convention to the selection process you can call an extension method of IUnityContainer:

container.WithConstructorArgumentMatchingConvention(new MyCustomConvention());

Get the source code for the SmartConstructor here (project TecX.Unity folder Injection and the test suite that shows how to use it in TecX.Unity.Test).

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