Managing objects creation and dependency injection with Zend\ServiceManager

06 February 2015 — Comments

Some time ago I wrote the most successful article of this blog, Advanced usage of ServiceManager in Zend Framework 2, explaining all the ways a service can be created by making use of Zend\ServiceManager, the service container component in Zend Framework 2.

On this article I’m going to show a real example where objects and services are all managed and created with a ServiceManager instance, which makes decoupling components and dependency injection very easy.

It is not a Zend Framework 2 application, because the ServiceManager is so integrated there that its power could go unnoticed. Instead, I’m using a Slim framework based application, which solves some common problems that has nothing to do with this article (like routing and request dispatching) and allows us to concentrate on what’s important.

The project is just a simple application to perform a CRUD over two fictitious entities, users and items. Very simple.

Getting the application

As usual, I have hosted the example application on github. Clone it from here, install dependencies by running composer install and start the built-in web server by running php -S 0.0.0.0:8000 -t public.

If you are not familiar with composer, take a look at this article.

If you are used to modern PHP applications, the project structure shouldn’t be a problem. There is a src folder with the source code, a public folder which is the document root of the application, a config folder with some configuration files and a tests folder with the unit tests.

Dependency injection

Let’s start with some thoughts about dependency injection.

In the past, when I had to learn dependency injection, I found out that many tutorials just explain that it is important to decouple componentes from the application, and pass elements to objects instead of letting them to create those elements inside themselves.

That’s a good theory, but introduces another problem. Without dependency injection, creating an object is as easy as new FooBar(), and all dependencies will be automatically created on the inside, but with dependency injection I could end with something like this.

$logger = new Logger('/var/log/mylogs.log');
$serviceOne = new ServiceOne('foo', 'bar');

$config = include __DIR__ . '/config/config_file.php');
$serviceTwo = new ServiceTwo($serviceOne, $config['param'], $config['another_param']);

$fooBar = new FooBar($serviceTwo, $logger);

Now I have to pass two dependencies to my FooBar object. One of them also dependes on another object and a raw configuration. And this process could even be more complex.

When I try to explain dependency injection, people usually tries to mentally adapt their old code and substitute the new FooBar() with the previous code snippet, and their reaction is usually “Dependency injection is hard! I will need to duplicate a lot of code!“.

What those tutorials don’t explain is how to solve this new problem, and that we now should define the way the objects are created just in one place, and have some mechanism to access to that objects anywhere else once created.

That task is usually performed by an object, the “inversion of control” container, in plenty of forms, a service locator, service container, dependency injection container…

The ServiceManager is going to act as the “inversion of control” container of this project. Let’s see how.

Solving the problem

Now that we have identified the problem, let’s take a look at the example, and how the ServiceManager is capable of managing the whole application, making the task of creating objects much easier and without code duplication.

Bootstrapping

The project’s front controller is the public/index.php file, which only includes the src/bootstrap.php file. The first thing we do is create the ServiceManager instance (there is no need for more than one in the whole project) by consuming the configuration in config/services.php.

$sm = new ServiceManager(new Config(include __DIR__ . '/../config/services.php'));

// ...

After that, we use the ServiceManager to get the app instance, the main object in Slim framework.

// ...

/** @var Slim $app */
$app = $sm->get('app');

// ...

Thanks to the ServiceManager, we have obtained the app object with just one instruction, $sm->get('app'), as easy as doing new \Slim\Slim(), but the ServiceManager has customized and cached our object, we just had to previously tell it how to do it.

If we go to the config/services.php file, we’ll see that there is an ‘app’ service defined as an alias of the Slim::class service, which in turn is an invokable, which means that it will be constructed by the ServiceManager just by instantiating the object with no arguments in the constructor.

But we said that the object has been customized. Where did that happen?

If we go to the delegators block, we’ll see that there is defined one delegator for the Slim::class service. Delegators are called by the ServiceManager, allowing us to customize certain service when it is going to be created.

Our SlimDelegator sets some configuration options in the Slim instance after it is created and before it is returned by the ServiceManager.

The name of a service can be anything as long as it is unique. Using the fully qualified class name is just a convention when there is only one way to create the object returned.

The final step of the bootstrap process is to use the app object to register a couple routes.

// ...

// Homepage
$app->get('/', function () use ($app) {
    $app->render('home.phtml');
})->name('home');

// Users pages
$app->addControllerRoute('/users/list', UserController::class . ':list')
    ->name('users-list')
    ->via('GET');
// ...

// Items pages
$app->addControllerRoute('/items/list', ItemController::class . ':list')
    ->name('items-list')
    ->via('GET');
// ...

The first route is the home page, which is only used to select between users and items.

The rest of the routes are endpoints to perform each operation of both users and items CRUDs. They are resolved to a controller’s action.

Controllers

Since Slim does not support controllers I’ve used the slimcontroller package which allows us to dynamically load controllers from Slim’s container.

I’ve also used this useful package I created some days ago, which replaces Slim’s container with another object which wraps a ServiceManager which is similar but much more powerful. In combination with slimcontroller makes controllers to be loaded from the ServiceManager.

That is to say, the last two routes will fetch a UserController::class or ItemController::class service from the ServiceManager and use it as the controller for that route.

Those two controllers are defined in config/services.php as factories. A factory is the easiest way to perform dependency injection in a service.

For example, the UserControllerFactory looks like this.

namespace Acelaya\Controller;

use Acelaya\Service\UserService;
use Slim\Slim;
use Zend\ServiceManager\FactoryInterface;
use Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceLocatorInterface;

class UserControllerFactory implements FactoryInterface
{
    public function createService(ServiceLocatorInterface $serviceLocator)
    {
        /** @var UserService $userService */
        $userService = $serviceLocator->get(UserService::class);
        return new UserController($userService);
    }
}

It creates the UserController instance and returns it, but it also injects its only dependency on it.

That dependency is also fetched from the ServiceManager, because that $serviceLocator is the ServiceManager which injects itself in factories when calling the createService method. That is really usefull, because we can access services easily in a recursive way.

At this point we don’t need to know how the UserService::class service is created, and we can focus on creating the UserController. That’s a good example of Single Responsibility Principle.

The ItemController is created in a very similar way. You can take a look at the class src/Controller/ItemControllerFactory.php.

But this is not all. Controllers extending the AbstractController depend also on a Slim\Http\Request, a Slim\Http\Response and a Slim\View that are not injected on their respective factories.

For this purpose we have defined three initializers in the config/services.php file, which will inject those objects on any instance implementing certain interfaces. The AbstractController implements all the interfaces, so creating a UserController or ItemController will result in all the initializers to inject those dependencies via setters.

This is one of the initializers, but the rest are very similar.

namespace Acelaya\Mvc;

use Zend\ServiceManager\InitializerInterface;
use Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceLocatorInterface;

class RequestAwareInitializer implements InitializerInterface
{
    public function initialize($instance, ServiceLocatorInterface $serviceLocator)
    {
        if ($instance instanceof RequestAwareInterface) {
            $app = $serviceLocator->get('app');
            $instance->setRequest($app->request);
        }
    }
}

We are fetching the app here. Since it is already created at this point, the ServiceManager will return the same instance.

Now we know that any route starting with /users will end with a fully configured UserController fetched from the ServiceManager, and any route starting with /items will do the same with an ItemController.

Other services

We saw that creating any controller will fetch another service from the ServiceManager. Those are the UserService::class or the ItemService::class respectively.

If we go to the config/services.php file we won’t find those services defined, but the ServiceManager is capable of creating them. And how is that?

In the abstract_factories block, we have defined a ServiceAbstractFactory. Abstract factories are used as last resort to create services that are not explicitly defined.

In our case both services extend the AbstractService and have the same dependencies. This abstract factory checks if the service that is going to be created extends that class, and in that case creates it by injecting another two dependencies fetched from the ServiceManager again (recursivity is awesome!), which will run their own factories.

This abstract factory is in src/Service/ServiceAbstractFactory.php, if you want to take a look at its implementation.

Everything is running

And thats all the theory. The application works now in theory. Check it.

The most powerful aspect of the ServiceManager is that objects are recursively created in different ways. The creation implementation is defined just in one place without code duplication.

We have performed dependency injection and the code wasn’t harder to handle.

Unit tests

The project now works, but we can’t remember to manually test everything every time we refactor the code or add new features. That’s where unit tests come.

Having a good test suite is hard, but it is even harder without dependency injection. Tests end running almost the whole application, with too many objects created under the hood when the subject under test is created.

With dependency injection, we can inject fake harmless objects in the subject under test, making sure we are going to test just a small piece of code. Indeed, one of the most important reasons to use dependency injection is to be able to test your code without wanting to kill yourself.

For example. On this project, both UserService and ItemService depend on an instance of Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager. That object performs operations against a database, but we don’t want to connect to the database every time we run our tests.

If you take a look at tests/Service/UserServiceTest.php you will see how the EntityManager is faked by using phpunit’s mocks API.

// ...

public function setUp()
{
    $repository = $this->getMock('Doctrine\Common\Persistence\ObjectRepository');
    $repository->expects($this->any())
               ->method('findAll')
               ->willReturn([]);

    $objectManager = $this->getMock('Doctrine\Common\Persistence\ObjectManager');
    $objectManager->expects($this->any())
                  ->method('getRepository')
                  ->willReturn($repository);
    $objectManager->expects($this->any())
                  ->method('persist')
                  ->willReturn(null);
    $objectManager->expects($this->any())
                  ->method('flush')
                  ->willReturn(null);
    $objectManager->expects($this->any())
                  ->method('find')
                  ->willReturn(new User());

    $this->userService = new UserService(
        $objectManager,
        new Logger(new Filesystem(new NullAdapter()), 'fake.log')
    );
}

// ...

If I wasn’t injecting the EntityManager, the UserService would be tightly coupled with the database. Instead, the UserService expects an object of an abstract type to be injected on it, so it is decoupled with the system that saves the data.

Conclusion

You have seen a real example which uses the ServiceManager. There is no theory, you can check it yourself. I have used each object creation strategy at least once (invokables, factories, initializers, abstract_factories and delegators) so that you can see how it works.

As I mentioned earlier, I already wrote a more theoretical article on the ServiceManager subject a while ago. You can find it here if you need it (indeed I recommend you to read it).

I hope you use dependency injection in your projects from now on. There is no excuse not to do it, you just need to change your point of view.

By the way, I have not explained everything of this project. If you start digging into the code and have any comment, feel free to post it here.