Fun with constructor arguments Part 2.1: Anonymous overrides revisited

After publishing the post on Anonymous overrides I thought about the topic again. In the end it didn’t make sense to put that functionality in a separate class.

The SmartConstructor already does most of the heavy lifting and matching the properties of an anonymous object to constructor parameters can easily be encapsulated in a new ParameterMatchingConvention.

As a result the SmartConstructor grew by a few lines of code (reading the properties of the anonymous object and converting them to ConstructorParameters) and I created a new convention called StringAsMappingNameMatchingConvention.

Get the overhauled 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).

Fun with constructor arguments Part 2: Anonymous overrides

An interesting feature of Castle Windsor is the ability to specify parameter overrides for a constructor using anonymous objects.

You define an anonymous object with properties named like the parameter you want to override and assign some value to it. You can either directly provide a value for that parameter or the name of a mapping you registered for the type of that parameter.

That means if you have a class with a dependency like this one:

public class MyService : IMyService
{
  public IFoo SomeFoo { get; set; }
  public MyService(IFoo someFoo)
  {
    this.SomeFoo = someFoo;
  }
}

and two classes that implement IFoo called Foo and Bar. Foo is registered as the default mapping (without a name) and Bar is registered as an additional mapping for IFoo with the name “Bar”:

container.RegisterType<IFoo, Foo>();
container.RegisterType<IFoo, Bar>("Bar");

You can use the AnonymousParameterOverride to specify that you want to use the named mapping instead of the default one:

container.RegisterType<IMyService, MyService>(new AnonymousParameterOverride(new  { foo = "Bar" });

Now this looks a little bit better than the default way Unity offers you to do this which is something like this:

container.RegisterType<IMyService, MyService>(
  new InjectionConstructor(new ResolvedParameter(typeof(IFoo), "Bar"));

But still not quite as fluent as I would like to see it. Unity does not really have a fluent configuration API but I took the liberty to write one.
The ConfigurationBuilder will be the subject of a series of posts on its own so for now let me just show you a glimpse at what is possible with it:

ConfigurationBuilder builder = new ConfigurationBuilder();
builder.For<IMyService>().Use<MyService>().Ctor(new { foo = "Bar" });

Much better isn’t it?

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