MVC IoC Component Lifestyle PerWebRequest

Question

I was just starting to get comfortable with MVC when somebody mentioned IoC containers to me, and now I feel like I've fallen a few thousand feet and need to climb back up again. I was tempted to just ignore them, but then I read up on the Component Lifestyle. This seems like a big deal to me, as explained, uncommited changes to database updates might leak across requests if my repositories Lifestyle is set to Singleton instead of PerWebRequest.

So my question...is there a way to create the Component Lifestyle affect without using IoC containers, or is that the only option?

Answer 1

You can always create an implementation as a Singleton. However when speaking about a Repository I don't think there is a need. This is not the real purpose to using an IoC though. Using the IoC decouples the user of your code from the implementation itself. It makes testing easier as you can swap things in and out as you need too. Also, in my case I find it very useful for other purposes as well. Take caching for example. In my local dev I use Lucene.NET to provide my cache implementation with a disk based cache. Then when I push to my development and staging platforms I use the standard .net cache implementation. Then when I push to production I might use a Velocity or MemCached implementation. I don't have to do anything fancy to get from point A to point B since I am using StructureMap (my preferred IoC container).

It seems to be that Component Lifestyle is more of a design decision than an IoC decision. All three of the methods mentioned here for managing the life of an object can be done without IoC...but that might be an interesting side effect of an IoC (in some cases).