Any alternative to injecting Castle Windsor typed factories? - castle-windsor

Question

Most of my components are registered using the code-based (fluent) approach, but there is one particular component that I need to resolve differently at runtime. This is the interface and a couple of concrete implementations:-
public interface ICommsService ...
public class SerialCommsService : ICommsService ...
public class TcpCommsService : ICommsService ...
Some of our users will need the serial service while others will need the TCP service. My current solution (which works btw) is to use a typed factory and a custom component selector - the latter reads an app.config setting to determine which implementation the typed factory will resolve and return.
First the typed factory (nothing special about this):-
public interface ICommsServiceFactory
{
ICommsService Create();
void Release(ICommsService component);
}
Next, the custom component selector, which reads the fully-qualified type name from app.config (e.g. "MyApp.SomeNamespace.TcpCommsService"):-
public class CommsFactoryComponentSelector : DefaultTypedFactoryComponentSelector
{
protected override string GetComponentName(MethodInfo method, object[] arguments)
{
return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["commsServiceType"];
}
}
Then the registration stuff:-
var container = new WindsorContainer();
container.AddFacility<TypedFactoryFacility>();
container.Register(Component.For<ITypedFactoryComponentSelector>()
.ImplementedBy<CommsFactoryComponentSelector>());
container.Register(Component.For<ICommsFactory>()
.AsFactory(o => o.SelectedWith<CommsFactoryComponentSelector>()));
container.Register(Component.For<ICommsService>()
.ImplementedBy<SerialCommsService>().LifeStyle.Singleton);
container.Register(Component.For<ICommsService>()
.ImplementedBy<TcpCommsService>().LifeStyle.Singleton);
Finally, an example class with a dependency on ICommsService:-
public class Test
{
public Test(ICommsFactory commsFactory)
{
var commsService = commsFactory.Create();
...
}
}
As already mentioned, the above solution does work, but I don't like having to inject the factory. It would be more intuitive if I could just inject an ICommsService, and let something somewhere figure out which implementation to resolve and inject - similar to what I'm doing now but earlier in Windsor's "resolving pipeline". Is something like that possible?

Answer 1

You can use UsingFactoryMethod here:
container.Register(Component.For<ICommsService>().UsingFactoryMethod(kernel => kernel.Resolve<ICommsServiceFactory>().Create()));
You can inject ICommsService to any class now. ICommsServiceFactory can be a simple interface now:
interface ICommsServiceFactory
{
ICommsService Create();
}