Dependency injection: How to pass the injection container around?

Question

(This question does not rely on a specific IoC framework, so the interfaces and types in my samples are meta-types. Just replace them with the appropriate types for your fav

Answer 1

You shouldn't pass the container around.

Instead, your entry-point/main method asks the container for the objects it needs to get started - such as your App object/bean. The container then returns the full object graph connected to App, which allows you to run app.Run(), with all the dependencies satisfied.

It's a bit of an anti-pattern for the objects to be aware of the container, or for each object to be asking the container for it's dependencies - if you do this then you have not inverted control and what you have is not dependency injection - you still have objects asking for what they need, rather than being given what they need.

Answer 2

It's best to avoid injecting the injector. Just create the types you need, and then start executing. I've written a somewhat longer post on this topic: Accessing the DI container