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Dependency Injection or Inversion?

The hardest thing about being a software developer, for me, is coming up with names for things. I’ve worked out a system with which I’m sort of comfortable where, when coding, I pay attention to every namespace, type, method and variable name that I create, but in a time-box (subject to later revisiting, of course). So I think about naming things a lot and I’m usually in a state of thinking, “that’s a decent name, but I feel like it could be clearer.”

And so we arrive at the titular question. Why is it sometimes called “dependency injection” and at other times, “dependency inversion.” This is a question I’ve heard asked a lot and answered sometimes too, often with responses that make me wince. The answer to the question is that I’m playing a trick on you and repeating a question that’s flawed.

Confused

Dependency Injection and Dependency Inversion are two distinct concepts. The reason that I led into the post with the story about naming is that these two names seem fine in a vacuum but, used together, they seem to create a ‘collision,’ if you will. If I were wiping the slate clean, I’d probably give “dependency inversion” a slightly different name, though I hesitate to say it since a far more accomplished mind than my own gave it the name in the first place.

My aim here isn’t to publish the Nth post exhaustively explaining the difference between these two concepts, but rather to supply you with (hopefully) a memorable mnemonic. So, here goes. Dependency Injection == “Gimme it” and Dependency Inversion == “Someone take care of this for me, somehow.” I’ll explain a bit further.

Dependency Injection is a generally localized pattern of writing code (though it may be used extensively in a code base). In any given method or class (or module, if you want) rather than you going out and finding or making the things you need, you simply order your collaborators to “gimme it.”

So instead of this:

public Time getTheTime() {
	ThingThatTellsTime atom = new CesiumAtom();
	return atom.getMeTheTimeSomehow();
}

You say, “nah, gimme it,” and do this instead:

public Time getTheTime(ThingThatTellsTime whatever) {
	return whatever.getMeTheTimeSomehow();
}

It isn’t you responsible for figuring out that time comes from atomic clocks which, in turn, come from atoms somehow. Not your problem. You say to your collaborators, “you want the time, Buddy? I’m gonna need a ThingThatTellsTime, and then it’s all yours.” (Usually you wouldn’t write this rather pointless method, but I wanted to keep the example as simple as humanly possible).

Dependency Inversion is a different kind of tradeoff. To visualize it, don’t think of code just yet. Think of a boss yelling at a developer. Before the ‘inversion’ this would have been straightforward. “Developer! You, Bill! Write me a program that tells time!” and Bill scurries off to do it.

But that’s so pre-Agile. Let’s do some dependency inversion and look at how it changes. Now, boss says, “Help, someone, I need a program that tells time! I’m going to put a story in the product backlog” and, at some point later, the team says, “oh, there’s something in the backlog. Don’t know how it got there, exactly, but it’s top priority, so we’ll figure out the details and get it done.” The boss and the team don’t really need to know about each other directly, per se. They both depend on the abstraction of the software development process; boss has no idea which person writes the code or how, and the team doesn’t necessarily know or care who plopped the story in the backlog. And, furthermore, the backlog abstraction doesn’t depend on knowing who the boss is or the developers are or exactly what they’re doing, but those details do depend on the backlog.

Okay, so first of all, why did I do one example in code and the other in anecdote, when I could have also done a code example? I did it this way to drive home the subtle scope difference in the concepts. Dependency injection is a discrete, code-level tactic. Dependency inversion is more of an architectural strategy and way of structuring (decoupling) code bases.

And finally, what’s my (mild) beef with the naming? Well, dependency inversion seems a little misleading. Returning to the boss ordering Bill around, one would think a strict inversion of the relationship would be the stuff of inane sitcom fodder where, “aha! The boss has become the bossed! Bill is now in charge!” Boss and Bill’s relationship is inverted, right? Well, no, not so much — boss and Bill just have an interface slapped in between them and don’t deal with one another directly anymore. That’s more of an abstraction or some kind of go-between than an inversion.

There was certainly a reason for that name, though, in terms of historical context. What was being inverted wasn’t the relationship between the dependencies themselves, but the thinking (of the time) about object oriented programming. At the time, OOP was very much biased toward having objects construct their dependencies and those dependencies construct their dependencies, and so forth. These days, however, the name lives on even as that style of OOP is more or less dead this side of some aging and brutal legacy code bases.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a better name to propose for either one of these things — only my colloquial mnemonics that are pretty silly. So, if you’re ever at a user group or conference or something and you hear someone talking about the “gimme it” pattern or the “someone take care of this for me, somehow” approach to architecture, come over and introduce yourself to me, because there will be little doubt as to who is talking.

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One Singleton to Rule Them All

I would like to preface this post by saying that I don’t like the Singleton design pattern at all. There are some who love it, others who view it as a sometimes-useful, often-abused tool in the toolbox, and then there are people like me who believe that it’s extremely rare to see a use of it that isn’t an abuse — so rare that I consider it better to avoid the pattern altogether. I won’t go into much more detail on my thoughts on the Singleton (stay tuned for that when I get to this pattern in my design patterns series), but here is some further reading that expounds a lot on reasons not to like this pattern:

  1. Scott Densmore: Why Singletons are Evil
  2. Misko Hevery: Singletons are Pathological Liars
  3. Alex Miller: Patterns I Hate
  4. Steve Yegge: Singleton Considered Stupid

With all of those arguments against Singleton in mind, and considering the damage that abuse (and I would argue use) of the pattern causes in code bases, I found myself thinking of code bases I’ve heard of or encountered where the code was littered with Singletons. In these code bases, refactoring becomes daunting for a variety of reasons: the hidden dependencies, the complex temporal dependencies, the sheer volume of references to the Singleton instances, the almost obligatory Law of Demeter violations, etc. Singletons cause/encourage a rich variety of problems in code bases. But I think that something could be done about two such problems: the redundant Singleton implementation logic and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) violation of which Singleton classes are prima facie guilty.

Take a look at how the Singleton is implemented (as recommended by Microsoft, here). The basic implementation initializes the static instance in the property accessor while variants use field initializing syntax and introduce thread safety.

The basic implementation is here:

public class Singleton
{
     private static Singleton instance;

     private Singleton() {}

     public static Singleton Instance
     {
          get
          {
               if (instance == null)
                    instance = new Singleton();
               return instance;
          }
     }
}

More specific even to C# is James Michael Hare’s implementation using the Lazy<T> class to eliminate the redundant if-instance-null-instantiate logic needed in each Singleton class. But that still leaves the redundant Instance property, the redundant _instance field, and the awkwardness (SRP violation) of an object managing its own cardinality. What if we got rid of both of those issues?

public static class Singleton where T : new()
{
     private static readonly Lazy _instance = new Lazy();

     public static T Instance { get { return _instance.Value; } }
}

public static class SingletonClient
{
     public void Demonstrate()
     {
          Singleton.Instance.Write("Look!! Logger isn't a Singleton -- it's a real class!!");
     }
}

Using generics, this implementation allows an instance of every Singleton to be expressed in the code of a single class. In this fashion, any type can be implemented as a Singleton without the type being coupled to an internal Singleton implementation. It also standardizes the Singleton implementation by making sure it exists only once in the code base. With this pattern, there is a similar feel to IoC containers — classes can be implemented without concern for who will instantiate them and how.

Here is my take on the disadvantages and potential disadvantages of this approach:

  1. You still have Singletons in your code base.
  2. This might actually encourage more Singleton usage (though fewer actual Singleton implementations) by removing responsibility for implementation.
  3. Since constructor of object in question must have public default constructor, removes the Singleton gimmick of making the constructor private and thus the safeguard against additional instances being created is also removed.
  4. A natural extension of the previous item is that it remains a matter of documentation or convention to use Singleton<T> and not instantiate rather than it being impossible to instantiate.

But the advantages that I see:

  1. Only one class implements cardinality management, meaning refactoring away from Singleton is nominally easier.
  2. No Singleton SRP violations
  3. Singleton implementation (initialization, lazy load, thread-safety) is standardized to prevent inconsistent approach.
  4. I actually consider preventing the private constructor gimmick to be a plus — particularly where potential refactoring may be needed (and it pretty much always is when Singletons exist).
  5. With this pattern in your code base developers are less likely to be come comfortable/familiar with implementing the Singleton pattern.
  6. No need to introduce interfaces for Singletons to inject instance into classes using dependency injection — just inject a non-Singleton managed instance.
  7. A code base with nothing but normal instances is very easy to reason about and test, so the closer you get to that, the better.

I would like to reiterate that I’m not suggesting that you run out and start doing this everywhere. It mitigates some of the natural problems with the Singleton design pattern but “mitigates some” is a long way from “fixes all”. But, if you have a code base littered with Singletons this could potentially be a nice intermediate refactoring step to at least standardize the singleton implementation and provide slightly more friendly seams to testing legacy code. Or if you’re faced with and outvoted by a group of other developers that love their global variables (er, excuse me, Singletons), this might be a decent compromise to limit the damage they cause to the code’s maintainability. On balance, I’d say that this is an interesting tool to add to your arsenal, but with the caveat that something is probably wrong if you find that you have a use for it.

I’d be curious to hear others’ takes on this as well. I just kind of dreamed this up off the top of my head without taking a lot of time to explore all potential ramifications of it use. If you’ve implemented something like this before or if you have opinions on the advantages/disadvantages that are different than mine or if you see ways it could be improved, I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments.

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FluentSqlGenerator

A while back, I made a post about using string.Join() to construct SQL where clauses from collections of individual clauses. In that post, I alluded to playing with a “more sophisticated” where clause builder. I did just that here and there and decided to post the results to github. You can find at here if you want to check it out.

My implementation makes use of the Composite design pattern and the idea of well formed formula semantics in formal systems such as propositional and first order logic. The latter probably sounds a little stuffy and exposes my inner math geek, but that’s just a rigorous way of expressing the concept of building a statement from literals and basic operations on those literals. To pull it back yet another level of stuffiness, consider simple arithmetic, in which all of the following are valid expressions: “6”, “12 + 6”, “12 + (9 – 3)”. The first expression is an atomic literal and the second expression a binary operation. The third expression is interesting in that it shows that functions can have arguments that are literals or other expressions (if this still seems strange, think of these examples as “6”, “Add(12, 6)” and “Add(12, Subtract(9, 3))”.

Think of how this applies to the propositional semantics that make up SQL query where clauses. I can have “Column1 = 12” or I can have “Column1 = 12 AND Column2 = 13” or I can have “Column1 = 12 AND (Column2 = 13 OR Column3 = 4)”. When I want to model this concept in an object oriented sense, I need to represent the operators “AND” and “OR” as objects with two properties: left expression and right expression. I also need it to be possible that either of these properties is a “literal” of the form “col = val” or that it could be another expression as with the last example. Composite is thus a natural fit when you consider that these clauses are really expression trees, in a very real sense. So there is a “Component” base that’s abstract and then “Clause” and “Operation” objects that inherit from them and are fungible when constructing expressions.

This was the core of the implementation, but I also dressed it up a bit with some extension methods to support a discoverable, fluent interface, but optionally (I’m still very leery of this construct, but this seems like an appropriate and judicious use). Another nice feature, in my opinion is that it supports generic parameters so you don’t have massive overloads — you can set your columns equal to objects, strings, decimals, ints, etc. It makes heavy use of ToString() with these generic parameters, so use any type you please so long as what you want out of it is well represented by ToString().

A sample API is as follows:

var clause = Column.Named("Column1").IsEqualTo(123);
Console.WriteLine(clause);

clause = Column.Named("Column1").IsEqualTo(123).And(Column.Named("Column2").IsEqualTo("123456"));
Console.WriteLine(clause);

clause = Column.Named("Column1").IsOneOf(1, 2, 3).Or(Column.Named("Column2").IsGreaterThan(12));
Console.WriteLine(clause);

clause = Are.AnyOfTheseTrue(Column.Named("Column1").IsEqualTo(832), Column.Named("Column2").IsLessThan(25.30));
Console.WriteLine(clause);

clause = Are.AreAllOfTheseTrue(Column.Named("Column1").IsEqualTo(832), Column.Named("Column2").IsLessThan(25.30), Column.Named("Column3").IsOneOf("Current", "Valid"));
Console.WriteLine(clause);

Console.ReadLine();

Currently supported SQL operations include various comparison (equal, not equal, greater, less, etc) as well as “like” and “in()”. Expression operators “AND”, “OR” and “NOT” are supported. The utility is well covered by unit tests and a handful of integration tests too if you want to poke around but preserve functionality.

Feel free to download, use, fork, enhance, make fun of, etc, whatever. I’m not pretending this is a problem never before solved nor that this is the most elegant solution imaginable, but it was fun to write, code-kata style, and if someone can get some use out of it, great. If I wind up making significant modifications to it or extending it, I’ll post updates here as well as checking changes into github.