Good and bad practices

Side effects

You should avoid creating side effects in your modules for two reasons:

  • Side effects will make it more difficult to test a module if you want to do it

  • Modules expose a way to acquire some resource but they don’t provide any way to release it. If, for example, your module connects to a remote server while creating a service you have no way of closing that connection unless the service exposes it.

Injecting into constructors vs injecting into other methods

Note

Injector 0.11+ doesn’t support injecting into non-constructor methods, this section is kept for historical reasons.

Note

Injector 0.11 deprecates using @inject with keyword arguments to declare bindings, this section remains unchanged for historical reasons.

In general you should prefer injecting into constructors to injecting into other methods because:

  • it can expose potential issues earlier (at object construction time rather than at the method call)

  • it exposes class’ dependencies more openly. Constructor injection:

    class Service1(object):
        @inject(http_client=HTTP)
        def __init__(self, http_client):
            self.http_client = http_client
            # some other code
    
        # tens or hundreds lines of code
    
        def method(self):
            # do something
            pass
    

    Regular method injection:

    class Service2(object):
        def __init__(self):
            # some other code
    
        # tens or hundreds lines of code
    
        @inject(http_client=HTTP)
        def method(self, http_client):
            # do something
            pass
    

    In first case you know all the dependencies by looking at the class’ constructor, in the second you don’t know about HTTP dependency until you see the method definition.

    Slightly different approach is suggested when it comes to Injector modules - in this case injecting into their constructors (or configure methods) would make the injection process dependent on the order of passing modules to Injector and therefore quite fragile. See this code sample:

    A = Key('A')
    B = Key('B')
    
    class ModuleA(Module):
        @inject(a=A)
        def configure(self, binder, a):
            pass
    
    class ModuleB(Module):
        @inject(b=B)
        def __init__(self, b):
            pass
    
    class ModuleC(Module):
        def configure(self, binder):
            binder.bind(A, to='a')
            binder.bind(B, to='b')
    
    
    # error, at the time of ModuleA processing A is unbound
    Injector([ModuleA, ModuleC])
    
    # error, at the time of ModuleB processing B is unbound
    Injector([ModuleB, ModuleC])
    
    # no error this time
    Injector([ModuleC, ModuleA, ModuleB])
    

Doing too much in modules and/or providers

An implementation detail of Injector: Injector and accompanying classes are protected by a lock to make them thread safe. This has a downside though: in general only one thread can use dependency injection at any given moment.

In best case scenario you “only” slow other threads’ dependency injection down. In worst case scenario (performing blocking calls without timeouts) you can deadlock whole application.

It is advised to avoid performing any IO, particularly without a timeout set, inside modules code.

As an illustration:

from threading import Thread
from time import sleep

from injector import inject, Injector, Module, provider

class A: pass
class SubA(A): pass
class B: pass


class BadModule(Module):
    @provider
    def provide_a(self, suba: SubA) -> A:
        return suba

    @provider
    def provide_suba(self) -> SubA:
        print('Providing SubA...')
        while True:
            print('Sleeping...')
            sleep(1)

        # This never executes
        return SubA()

    @provider
    def provide_b(self) -> B:
        return B()


injector = Injector([BadModule])

thread = Thread(target=lambda: injector.get(A))

# to make sure the thread doesn't keep the application alive
thread.daemon = True
thread.start()

# This will never finish
injector.get(B)
print('Got B')

Here’s the output of the application:

Providing SubA...
Sleeping...
Sleeping...
Sleeping...
(...)

Injecting Injector and abusing Injector.get

Sometimes code like this is written:

class A:
    pass

class B:
    pass

class C:
    @inject
    def __init__(self, injector: Injector):
        self.a = injector.get(A)
        self.b = injector.get(B)

It is advised to use the following pattern instead:

class A:
    pass

class B:
    pass

class C:
    @inject
    def __init__(self, a: A, b: B):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b

The second form has the benefits of:

  • expressing clearly what the dependencies of C are

  • making testing of the C class easier - you can provide the dependencies (whether they are mocks or not) directly, instead of having to mock Injector and make the mock handle Injector.get() calls

  • following the common practice and being easier to understand

Injecting dependencies only to pass them somewhere else

A pattern similar to the one below can emerge:

class A:
    pass

class B:
    def __init__(self, a):
        self.a = a

class C:
    @inject
    def __init__(self, a: A):
        self.b = B(a)

Class C in this example has the responsibility of gathering dependencies of class B and constructing an object of type B, there may be a valid reason for it but in general it defeats the purpose of using Injector and should be avoided.

The appropriate pattern is:

class A:
    pass

class B:
    @inject
    def __init__(self, a: A):
        self.a = a

class C:
    @inject
    def __init__(self, b: B):
        self.b = b