Advanced Dependency Injection With Guice

The more I use dependency injection (DI) in my code, the more it alters the way I see both my design and implementation. Injection is so convenient and powerful that you end up wanting to make sure you use it as often as you can. And as it turns out, you can use it in many, many places.

Let’s cover briefly the most obvious scenarios where DI, and more specifically, Guice, are a good fit: objects created either at class loading time or very early in your application. These two aspects are covered by either direct injection or by providers, which allow you to start building some of your object graph before you can inject more objects. I won’t go too much in details about these two use cases since they are explained in pretty much any Guice tutorial you can find on the net.

Once the injector has created your graph of objects, you are pretty much back to normal and instantiating your “runtime objects” (the objects you create during the life time of your application) the normal way, most likely with “new” or factories. However, you will quickly start noticing that you need some runtime information to create these objects, other parts of them could be injected.

Let’s take the following example: we have a GeoService interface that provides various geolocation functions, such as telling you if two addresses are close to each other:

public interface GeoService {
  /**
   * @return true if the two addresses are within @param{miles}
   * miles of each other.
   */
  boolean isNear(Address address1, Address address2, int miles);
}

Then you have a Person class which uses this service and also needs a name and an address to be instantiated:

public class Person {
  // Fields omitted
 
  public Person(String name, Address address, GeoService gs) {
    this.name = name;
    this.address = address;
    this.geoService = gs;
  }
 
  public boolean livesNear(Person otherPerson) {
    return geoService.isNear(address, otherPerson.getAddress(),
        2 /* miles */);
  }
}

Something odd should jump at you right away with this class: while name and address are part of the identity of a Person object, the presence of the GeoService instance in it feels wrong. The service is a singleton that is created on start up, so a perfect candidate to be injected, but how can I achieve the creation of a Person object when some of its information is supplied by Guice and the other part by myself?

Guice gives you a very elegant and flexible way to implement this scenario with “assisted injection”.

The first step is to define a factory for our objects that represents exactly how we want to create them:

public interface PersonFactory {
  Person create(String name, Address address);
}

Since only name and address participate in the identity of our Person objects, these are the only parameters we need to construct our objects. The other parameters should be supplied by Guice so we modify our Person constructor to let Guice know:

@Inject
public Person(@Assisted String name, @Assisted Address address,
    GeoService geoService) {
  this.name = name;
  this.address = address;
  this.geoService = geoService;
}

In this code, I have added an @Inject annotation on the constructor and an @Assisted annotation on each parameter that I will be providing. Guice will take care of injecting the rest.

Finally, we connect the factory to its objects when creating the module:

Module module1 = new FactoryModuleBuilder()
    .build(PersonFactory.class);

The important part here is to realize that we will never instantiate PersonFactory: Guice will. From now on, all we need to do whenever we want to instantiate a Person object is to ask Guice to hand us a factory:

@Inject
private PersonFactory personFactory;
 
// ...
 
Person p = personFactory.create("Bob", new Address("1 Ocean st"));

If you want to find out more, take a look at the main documentation for assisted injection, which explains how to support overloaded constructors and also how to create different kinds of objects within the same factory.

Wrapping up

Let’s take a look at what we did. First, we started with a suspicious looking constructor:

public Person(String name, Address address, GeoService s) {

This constructor is suspicious because it accepts parameters that do not participate in the identity of the object (you won’t use the GeoService parameter when calculating the hash code of a Person object). Instead, we replaced this constructor with a factory that only accepts identity fields:

public interface PersonFactory {
  Person create(String name, Address address);
}

and we let Guice’s assisted injection take care of creating a fully formed object for us.

This observation leads us to the Identity Constructor rule:

If a constructor accepts parameters that are not used to define the identity of the objects, consider injecting these parameters.

Once you start looking at your objects with this rule in mind, you will be surprised to find out how many of them can benefit from assisted injection.