Dude, where is my Kaizen?

Björn Rochel's weblog

Since I’ve read some bits about Rails I often wondered how “Convention over Configuration” (CoC) might look like in a .NET environment. StructureMap  was (AFAIK) the first IoC container in the .Net realm which provided functionality in order to combine conventions with dependency injection. It’s not surprising that StoryTeller relies a lot on StructureMap and CoC, considering that both tools share the same author.

So let’s dive into the StoryTeller trunk and look at how CoC is applied inside the tool. I’m starting with the Bootstrapper of the application. The main responsibility of the Bootstrapper (as its name implies) is to boot up and configure StructureMap in order to wire together all the parts of the application.

public static IContainer BuildContainer()
{
    ObjectFactory.Initialize(x =>
    x.AddRegistry<UserInterfaceRegistry>());
    return ObjectFactory.Container;
}

The StructureMap configuration is implemented using the nested closure pattern. After the closure has been executed, the internal dependency graph of StructureMap is sealed and cannot be changed anymore. I think this has to do with the ILGeneration aspect of StructureMap.

A “Registry” is the abstraction which is used by StructureMap in order to modularize the container configuration. If we take a look at the UserInterfaceRegistry from StoryTeller we see a lot of interesting stuff, but today I would like to focus on the particular part of the Registry which configures all the conventions. It looks like this:

public class UserInterfaceRegistry : Registry
{
       public UserInterfaceRegistry()
       {
           ...
           Scan(x =>
           {
               x.TheCallingAssembly();
               x.AssemblyContainingType<ITestEngine>();
               ...
               x.WithDefaultConventions();
               x.ConnectImplementationsToTypesClosing(typeof (IContextualAction<>));
               ...
            });
       }
       ...
}

If you take a look at how most containers work today, you see a lot of map-this-class-to-that-interface and map-that-class-with-this-id-under-that-interface stuff when the container is configured. All of this has to be done mostly by hand and is very repetitive.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the IoC container could give us a helping hand and free us from most of this simple configuration code? That’s exactly what StructureMap tries to do.

The “Scan” block configures StructureMap to automatically scan the configured assemblies and pass each found type in those assemblies into a chain of classes implementing the ITypeScanner interface. Those classes are responsible for applying CoC in StructureMap.  You can register a class by adding a

x.With<NameOfConcreteTypeScanner>();

to the scan block. The StructureMap assembly contains several ITypeScanner implementations out of the box. One of them is the DefaultConventionsScanner which is configured by

x.WithDefaultConventions();

StructureMaps default convention does the following: For each concrete type it looks for an interface whose name (minus the “I” prefix) matches the name of the concrete type. If it finds one, it automatically registers a mapping between those two types.

public class DefaultConventionScanner : TypeRules, ITypeScanner
{
      public virtual Type FindPluginType(Type concreteType)
      {
              string interfaceName = "I" + concreteType.Name;
              return Array.Find<Type>(concreteType.GetInterfaces(), delegate (Type t)
              {
                 return t.Name == interfaceName;
              });
       } 

       public void Process(Type type, PluginGraph graph)
       {
               if (base.IsConcrete(type))
               {
                   Type pluginType = this.FindPluginType(type); 

                   if ((pluginType != null) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; Constructor.HasConstructors(type))
                   {
                        graph.AddType(pluginType, type);
                   }
               }
        }
}

Conventions are really easy to implement, because the StructureMap assembly provides a lot of the necessary functionality through extension methods and base classes. Just to give you an example what you can also do, here is an example from one of my current projects.

public class RegisterNamedImplementationsOf<TContract> : TypeRules, ITypeScanner
{
    private readonly string ContractName = FindContractName(); 

    #region ITypeScanner Members 

    public void Process(Type type, PluginGraph graph)
    {
          if (IsConcrete(type) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; type.Implements<TContract>())
          {
               string name = FindImplementationName(type); 

               if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(name) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; Constructor.HasConstructors(type))
               {
                    graph.AddType(typeof (TContract), type, name);
                }
          }
     } 

     #endregion 

     private string FindImplementationName(Type concreteType)
     {
          if (!concreteType.Name.Contains(ContractName))
          {
              return null;
          } 

          return concreteType.Name.Replace(ContractName, string.Empty);
     } 

     private static string FindContractName()
     {
          return typeof (TContract).Name.TrimStart('I');
      }
}

The convention basically does this: If you have an IReportGenerator interface and one or more classes are found which implement the interface and end with ReportGenerator, they are automatically registered with their prefix in the container (for instance “Html” for HtmlReportGenerator or “Text” for “TextReportGenerator”. You can set this convention up by configuring

 x.With<RegisterNamedImplementationsOf<IReportGenerator>>();

Having configured it that way you’re able to access for instance the "Html" generator by calling

container.GetInstance<IReportGenerator>("Html");

Is there a downside of doing it that way?

You certainly loose a lot of debuggability when assembling your application based on conventions. For me personally this isn’t such a big deal because I always try to use the debugger only when I have no other option left and rely a lot on my test suite. What you need in order to overcome this lack of debuggability is some reporting functionality as a safety net for the rare situations where the container doesn’t behave as you expect it to. To our luck StructureMap contains helpers for those situations, for example

ObjectFactory.WhatDoIHave();

which gives a detailed report on the currently configured dependency graph or

ObjectFactory.AssertConfigurationIsValid();

which validates the container configuration. A lot of the CoC stuff may look like "voodhoo" or "black magic" to some developers at first, but I think they should be able to get used to it. Conventions can be easily documented and are in my opinion easier to remember as stuff like if-you-want-to-register-this-you-need-to-add-it-to-file-XY-at-the-end-of-method-Z . . .

That’s all for now. Next time we’ll look at how a kind of  “startable facitility” is implemented in StoryTeller . . .