Resolving IEnumerable<T> with Unity

Question

Can Unity automatically resolve IEnumerable<T>?

Let's say I have a class with this constructor:

public CoalescingParserSelector(IEnumerable<IParserBuilder> parserBuilders)

and I configure individual IParserBuilder instances in the container:

container.RegisterType<IParserSelector, CoalescingParserSelector>();
container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, HelpParserBuilder>();
container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, SomeOtherParserBuilder>();

can I make this work without having to implement a custom implementation of IEnumerable<IParserBuilder>?

var selector = container.Resolve<IParserSelector>();

So far I haven't been able to express this in any simple way, but I'm still ramping up on Unity so I may have missed something.

Answer 1

I believe you'll need to use the ResolveAll method and use an explicit InjectionConstructor object, i.e.:

container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, HelpParserBuilder>();
container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, SomeOtherParserBuilder>();

var injectedBuilders = new InjectionConstructor(container.ResolveAll<IParserBuilder>());
container.RegisterType<IParserSelector, CoalescingParserSelector>(injectedBuilders);

In other words, I don't think Unity is able to automatically resolve all instances of a type and know to use constructor injection on a class with an IEnumerable parameter without an explicitly declaring an InjectionConstructor object at Run Time.

Granted I'm still learning Unity as well, but this has been my experience (YMMV).

Answer 2

@Metro Smurf: your answer got me in the right track: Unity is unable to automatically resolve IEnumerable dependencies.

I wasn't able to compile your example since the RegisterType method doesn't take an InjectionConstructor instance as parameter.

Also note that the ResolveAll method will only work if you've registered multiple types with different names and also this method does NOT return an instance for the default (unnamed) registration. (I completely disagree with this behavior btw).

This is what worked for me:

container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, HelpParserBuilder>("HelpParserBuilder");
container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, SomeOtherParserBuilder>("SomeOtherParserBuilder");
container.RegisterType<IParserSelector, CoalescingParserSelector>();

container.Configure<InjectedMembers>().ConfigureInjectionFor<CoalescingParserSelector>(new InjectionConstructor(container.ResolveAll<IParserBuilder>()));

In order to resolve a single instance you will need to also add a default registration otherwise the call to Resolve() will fail.

This code makes the default registration to enable single resolution:

container.RegisterType<IParserBuilder, HelpParserBuilder>();
IParserBuilder builder = container.Resolve<IParserBuilder>()

Answer 3

As of May 2010, there is the native support for that. Check it out here.

Answer 4

It turns out that this is actually awfully simple to do:

container.RegisterType<IEnumerable<IParserBuilder>, IParserBuilder[]>();

Unity natively understands arrays, so we just need to map the enumerable to an array of the same type.