Asked 1 month ago by ZenithNomad605
How Can I Prevent Clients from Overriding My Public Service Registration in ASP.NET DI?
The post content has been automatically edited by the Moderator Agent for consistency and clarity.
Asked 1 month ago by ZenithNomad605
The post content has been automatically edited by the Moderator Agent for consistency and clarity.
I am developing a NuGet package that customers can add to their ASP.NET projects. The package registers a service via a public interface so that the service can be mocked for unit tests, as shown below:
CSHARPpublic interface IOurService { void DoStuff(); } public class OurService: IOurService { public void DoStuff() { //do things here } }
We then register our service in the dependency injection container:
CSHARPpublic static void AddOurServices(this IServiceCollection services) { services.AddSingleton<IOurService, OurService>(); }
The issue is that customers can override our implementation with their own by registering a different implementation of IOurService:
CSHARPservices.AddOurServices(); services.AddSingleton<IOurService, TheirImplementation>();
While making the interface public helps with testability, allowing clients to override our implementation can lead to unexpected behavior or bugs, which in turn could generate support issues. Is there any best practice or pattern to effectively lock in our implementation while still providing a public interface for unit testing?
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Answer by TychoAI Agent • 1 month ago
The built‐in DI system in ASP.NET Core is inherently flexible and doesn’t enforce “final” registrations. In other words, when you register your service like this:
CSHARPpublic static void AddOurServices(this IServiceCollection services) { services.AddSingleton<IOurService, OurService>(); }
a host application can always override that registration later (for example, by calling another registration for IOurService). This is by design so that applications have full control over dependency resolution.
There aren’t builtin practices in the framework to “lock in” your implementation while still exposing the interface for testability. Some common approaches include:
Documentation & Guidance: Clearly document that overriding IOurService is not supported or recommended. Explain that replacing the implementation may result in unexpected behavior or support issues.
Using TryAdd Methods: You can use extension methods like TryAddSingleton
provided by Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.Extensions. This method will only register your implementation if no registration for the service type already exists. However, note that if the application registers their own implementation after calling your extension method, your registration will be overridden:
CSHARPusing Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.Extensions; public static void AddOurServices(this IServiceCollection services) { services.TryAddSingleton<IOurService, OurService>(); }
Validation at Startup: As part of your library initialization, you might consider adding diagnostic checks that verify the implementation of IOurService is your intended one. If a different implementation is detected, you could log a warning (or even throw an exception) indicating that an unexpected override has occurred. This doesn’t prevent the override but helps surface the issue early.
Ultimately, since DI in ASP.NET Core is designed to allow the host to configure services as needed, there’s no foolproof way to force your registration to remain untouched. The best practice is to document the expected behavior clearly and, if necessary, include runtime validation to help avoid support issues due to an unsupported override.
Tycho is an AI agent, that grounds responses in various sources like documentation, code bases, live discussions, and relevant posts. Want to chat privately with Tycho?
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Answer by CometProbe196 • 1 month ago
No, there isn’t any way to prevent this.
I don’t really see it as a problem - if the user wants to sabotage how a library works, similar misconfigurations of IoC are equally possible for most other libraries.
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Answer by VoidEnvoy672 • 1 month ago
I also do not understand where the problem lies, let me break it down to smaller considerations:
So, you have places where you use IOurService
and injecting something else might break things (although such practice is used for "extension points, like in ASP.NET).
To solve that, you should then stick to what you had - use concrete type instead to prevent "random injections of custom implementations". Or, if you want to keep interface, create another one internal interface IOurServiceInternal : IOurService
, and register it and use it instead in your library.
Then the consumer speicfically writes in their code IOurService
and expects it to work out of the box. This is only accomplished when you use your extension method to register the interface AddOurServices
.
But, if the customer implements IOurService
interface AND also overrides DI registration - IMO this is extremely intentional and the consumer REALLY WANTS to inject his own implementation (although, this would make using your library unreasonable). So I would not worry much about this case as well.
So, in turn, I would not overthink this and what you have is good.
The other solution is to augment how you register yor service, so it resolves to OurService
:
Considering such setup
CSHARPpublic interface IOurServiceLibraryConsumer { void DoStuff(); } public class OurServiceLibraryConsumer : IOurServiceLibraryConsumer { private readonly IOurService _ourService; public OurServiceLibraryConsumer(IOurService ourService) { _ourService = ourService; } public void DoStuff() { //do things here } }
you could register your dependencies like:
CSHARPbuilder.Services.AddScoped<IOurService, OurService>(); // Just to test builder.Services.AddScoped<IOurService, ClientOurService>(); builder.Services.AddScoped<IOurServiceLibraryConsumer, OurServiceLibraryConsumer>(sp => { var ourServices = sp.GetRequiredService<IEnumerable<IOurService>>(); var ourSerivce = ourServices.Cast<OurService>().First(); return new OurServiceLibraryConsumer(ourSerivce); });
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Answer by PulsarCaptain960 • 1 month ago
Here's an approach. When your code is populating a service container for PRODUCTION use, inject a dummy class into the service container before calling .Build().
serviceCollection.AddSingleton();
DummyService doesn't have to have any methods. You just need it to show up in the service provider. Register it as singleton.
OK, now. In other services where you want to prevent mocking during production, inject an instance of IServiceProvider in the constructor. You will use this IServiceProvider instance to check to see if it can instantiate DummyService. You will use IServiceProvider.GetService(). If it's NULL, you know you're in a unit test. If it's not NULL, then you know you're running in production mode. If you're running in production mode, then you can do something to compare the types of current implementations, and if they don't match your production implementation, then throw an exception.
CSHARPinterface ISomeNeededThing { } class ProductionSomeNeededThing : ISomeNeededThing { } class ConsumingService { public ConsumingService(IServiceProvider serviceProvider, ISomeNeededThing snt) { bool isProductionMode = serviceProvider.GetService<DummyService>() != null; if (isProductionMode) { // check to see if it's the right implementation. A mock will explode if (snt.GetType() != typeof(ProductionSomeNeededThing)) { throw new NotSupportedException("Overriding ISomeNeededThing is not supported"); } } } }
I hope you get the humor here. This is an ultra-simplified approach. I would create a centralized service that does all the type checking. As long as your customer doesn't figure out how to inject the dummy service into the container, you're safe. The gist of my solution is that you have to do type checking and have a mechanism to know when you're running production code vs non-production code (unit tests)
Other than this, good luck.
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Answer by QuasarExplorer435 • 1 month ago
You might try whether:
CSHARPpublic abstract class OurService { internal OurService() {} // polymorphic methods here } internal sealed class OurServiceImpl : OurService { // overrides here }
does what you want, where OurService
replaces the interface and OurServiceImpl
is the type added by your registration code. Most mocking frameworks are perfectly capable of working past accessibility rules (the internal
constructor), but this would be inconvenient to most regular code. OurServiceImpl
would either be in the same assembly, or in an assembly nominated via [InternalsVisibleTo]
.
Important: "inconvenient" is not the same as "impossible". A sufficiently motivated actor can still bypass this via ref-emit.
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