StructureMap, ObjectFactory and the IContainer

Question

I'm working with StructureMap for my IoC needs.

To make things pleasantly testable, I'm passing IContainer instances around wherever possible, usually as constructor parameters. As a convenience, I'd like to be able to fall back to using ObjectFactory for a parameterless constructor.

The simplest way (I thought) to do this would be to simply get the IContainer the ObjectFactory class wraps and pass that to the other constructor. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere this instance is publicly exposed.

The question is:

Is there a way to get the IContainer within ObjectFactory so I can handle it as simply as a user-supplied instance?

Alternatively, is there a way to duplicate the configuration of the ObjectFactory into a new Container instance?

Example:

I would like to be able to do the following:

public class MyClass
{
    public MyClass()
    {
        Container = ... // The ObjectFactory container instance.
    }

    public MyClass(IContainer container)
    {
        Container = container;
    }

    public IContainer Container { get; private set; }
}

Answer 1

ObjectFactory exposes a Container property which gives you the IContainer you are looking for.

Anytime you need an IContainer (which should not be often) you can always take a dependency on it in your class ctor.

public class INeedAContainer
{
    private readonly IContainer _container;

    public INeedAContainer(IContainer container)
    {
        _container = container;
    }

    // do stuff
}

I do not think there is a way to clone an IContainer. There is a container.GetNestedContainer() method which allows you to keep your transients the same for the lifetime of the nested container. Nested containers are often used within a "using" statement and are very handy for controlling the state of things like database transaction boundaries.