CastleWindsor chained dependency

Source code is available here.

I recently had a problem where I wanted an MVC controller to use constructor injection of specified dependency and have that dependency load another specified dependency using Windsor.

For example, I have a message of the day controller and it can get messages from either a file or from a database. To support this I have a message of the day service which formats the text it retrieves from a message of the day loader.

But as I said I have two ways of loading the message, so for the sake of this demo I have two services and two loaders.

Controller, service and loader dependencies

I don’t want my controller to request a named instance, I just want to register the implementations in the installers and let Windsor do the rest.

If the controller is using the database service, I want the database service to use the database loader; if the controller is using the file service, I want the file service to use the file loader.

To support this I added a ContractInstaller as shown here.

    public class ContractInstaller : IWindsorInstaller
    {
        public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store)
        {
            container.Register(
                 Component.For<IMessageLoader>().ImplementedBy<MessageLoaderDatabase>()
                ,Component.For<IMessageLoader>().ImplementedBy<MessageLoaderFile>()

                ,Component.For<IMessageOfTheDayService>().ImplementedBy<MessageOfTheDayServiceDatabase>()
                    .DependsOn(Dependency.OnComponent<IMessageLoader, MessageLoaderDatabase>())

                ,Component.For<IMessageOfTheDayService>().ImplementedBy<MessageOfTheDayServiceFile>()
                    .DependsOn(Dependency.OnComponent<IMessageLoader, MessageLoaderFile>())

                ,Component.For<MessageOfTheDayController>().LifestyleTransient()
                    .DependsOn(Dependency.OnComponent<IMessageOfTheDayService, MessageOfTheDayServiceFile>())
            );
        }
    }

In lines 6 and 7 I register the loaders (IMessageLoader), and in lines 9 and 12 I register the the services (IMessageOfTheDayService) and they in turn depend on the registered loaders.
In line 15 I register the controller (MessageOfTheDayController) and its dependency on IMessageOfTheDayService, in this case it is using MessageOfTheDayServiceFile.
To use the MessageOfTheDayServiceDatabase, change the dependency on line 16.

Be sure to load this before the ControllersInstaller provided by the Windsor nuget or you will get a clash between the MessageOfTheDayController loaded by both installers. To make sure this happens I alter the default Bootstrap method in ContainerBootstrapper to the following.

        public static ContainerBootstrapper Bootstrap()
        {
            var container = new WindsorContainer().Install(
                new ContractInstaller(),
                new ControllersInstaller()
                );

            return new ContainerBootstrapper(container);
        }

Now when you run the app, the controller will be instantiated with the MessageOfTheDayServiceDatabase which in turn will be instantiated with MessageLoaderDatabase.