How to carry out custom initialisation with autofac

Question

I'm adding autofac to an existing project and some of the service implementations require their Initialize method to be called and passed configuration information. Currently I'm using the code:

builder.Register(context =>
              {
               var service = new SqlTaxRateProvider(
      context.Resolve<IUserProvider>()
      );
               service.Initialize(config);
               return service;

              }
).As<ITaxService>()
.SingleInstance();

which works but I'm still creating the object myself which is what I'm trying to get away from this and allow autofac to handle it for me. Is it possible to configuration a post create operation that would carry out the custom initialisation?

To give you an idea of what I'm after ideally this would be the code:

builder.RegisterType<SqlTaxRateProvider>()
 .As<ITaxService>()
 .OnCreated(service=> service.Initialize(config))
 .SingleInstance();

Update: I am using Autofac-2.1.10.754-NET35

Answer 1

.OnActivating(e => e.Instance.Initialize(...))

should do the trick.

You might also investigate the Startable module (see Autofac wiki).

Mark's suggestion to do initialisation in the constrictor is also a good one. In that case use

.WithParameter(new NamedParameter("config", config))

to merge the config parameter in with the other constructor dependencies.

Cheers!

Nick