Autofac Generic Service resolution at runtime

Question

Recently, Castle added support for interface factories with implementations provided by the kernel. I am wondering if there is a way to do this in autofac also. I have read abou

Answer 1

You could isolate that coupling by creating a concrete IHandlerFactory, say AutofacHandlerFactory, which would receive the ILifetimeScope. That coupling seems inevitable since the container is the only one who can resolve the proper IHandler<T>.

Coupling with ILifetimeScope might be a bad idea, but then, the coupling is isolated inside the concrete IHandlerFactory, and the Bus just uses it through an interface. Let's say you change the container and starts using Ninject, you could just implement a NinjectHandlerFactory to do the job.

Answer 2

Seems like the answer is 'No'.

I've tried to use AggregateService which is supposed to do what you want, but it crashes during factory resolution with message 'The type "Castle.Proxies.IComponentFactoryProxy" from assembly "DynamicProxyGenAssembly2, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null" has tried to implement an unaccessible interface.' (The original message is in Russian, I've translated it).

I can't figure out another approach that would work without a manual (yet quite simple) implementation. Maybe you should write to Nicholas Blumhardt.

In fact, I'd better do it this way:

public class Bus {
  readonly ILifetimeScope _OwnScope;

  // Autofac always provides ILifetimeScope that owns a component as a service to the component
  // so it can be used as a dependency
  public Bus(ILifetimeScope ownScope) {
    _OwnScope = ownScope;
  }

  void Send<T>(T message) {
    _OwnScope.Resolve<IHandler<T>>.Handle(message);
  }
}

You will probably argue that coupling with ILifetimeScope is a bad idea. Well, it's quite a simple interface which might be wrapped into your own implementation. Or you may factor the code out into a simple factory class. Well, it seems like you know how to do this without my suggestions.