Dealing with Multiple Implementations of a Service in ASP.NET Core & ABP Dependency Injection

ASP.NET Core provides a built-in dependency injection system to register your services to the dependency injection container and inject/resolve them whenever you need. ABP's dependency injection infrastructure is built on ASP.NET Core's DI system, automates service registration by conventions and provides some additional features.

In this tutorial, I will explain how you can register multiple implementations of the same service interface and inject/resolve all these implementations when you need them.

Defining Services

Assume that you have an IExternalLogger interface with two implementations:

public interface IExternalLogger
{
    Task LogAsync(string logText);
}

public class ElasticsearchExternalLogger : IExternalLogger
{
    public async Task LogAsync(string logText)
    {
        // TODO...
    }
}

public class AzureExternalLogger : IExternalLogger
{
    public async Task LogAsync(string logText)
    {
        // TODO...
    }
}

An example service injecting the IExternalLogger interface:

public class MyService : ITransientDependency
{
    private readonly IExternalLogger _externalLogger;

    public MyService(IExternalLogger externalLogger)
    {
        _externalLogger = externalLogger;
    }

    public async Task DemoAsync()
    {
        await _externalLogger.LogAsync("Example log message...");
    }
}

In this example, we haven't registered any of the implementation classes to the dependency injection system yet. So, if we try to use the MyService class, we get an error indicating that no implementation found for the IExternalLogger service. We should register at least one implementation for the IExternalLogger interface.

Registering Services

If we register both of the ElasticsearchExternalLogger and AzureExternalLogger services for the IExternalLogger interface, and then try to inject the IExternalLogger interface, the last registered implementation will be used. However, how to determine the last registered implementation?

If we implement one of the dependency interfaces (e.g. ITransientDependency), then the registration order will be uncertain (it may depend on the namespaces of the classes). The last registered implementation can be different than you expect. So, it is not suggested to use the dependency interfaces to register multiple implementations.

You can register your services in the ConfigureServices method of your module:

public override void ConfigureServices(ServiceConfigurationContext context)
{
    context.Services.AddTransient<IExternalLogger, ElasticsearchExternalLogger>();
    context.Services.AddTransient<IExternalLogger, AzureExternalLogger>();
}

In this case, you get an AzureExternalLogger instance when you inject the IExternalLogger interface, because the last registered implementation is the AzureExternalLogger class.

Injecting Multiple Implementations

When you have multiple implementation of an interface, you may want to work with all these implementations. For this example, you may want to write log to all the external loggers. We can change the MyService implementation as the following:

public class MyService : ITransientDependency
{
    private readonly IEnumerable<IExternalLogger> _externalLoggers;

    public MyService(IEnumerable<IExternalLogger> externalLoggers)
    {
        _externalLoggers = externalLoggers;
    }

    public async Task DemoAsync()
    {
        foreach (var externalLogger in _externalLoggers)
        {
            await externalLogger.LogAsync("Example log message...");
        }
    }
}

In this example, we are injecting IEnumerable<IExternalLogger> instead of IExternalLogger, so we have a collection of the IExternalLogger implementations. Then we are using a foreach loop to write the same log text to all the IExternalLogger implementations.

If you are using IServiceProvider to resolve dependencies, then use its GetServices method to obtain a collection of the service implementations:

IEnumerable<IExternalLogger> services = _serviceProvider.GetServices<IExternalLogger>();

Further Reading

In this small tutorial, I explained how you can register multiple implementations of the same interface to the dependency injection system and inject/resolve all of them when you need.

If you want to get more information about ABP's and ASP.NET Core's dependency injection systems, you can read the following documents:

Farouk Belhocine 128 weeks ago

Hi Very interesting. Thanks for the simplicity.

Halil İbrahim Kalkan 128 weeks ago

You're welcome :)

Damien R 107 weeks ago

Thanks for your article, it as almost exactly what I was searching for.

A little detail was that I wanted to use Dependency Interfaces to inject instead of having explicitly to use context.Services to avoid having to add a reference for each class. The problem of ordering was irrelevant for me because I wanted all implementations to call them all.

I strugled with the naming convention. Multiple implementations class can't respect the convention because they'll have specific names. I was able to correct it by adding `[ExposeServices(typeof(IExternalLogger))]``

Alexander Nikonov 29 weeks ago

Unfortunately, this approach does not help to resolve the following issue (or I might be missing something obvious).

We have the override for IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService:

[Dependency(ReplaceServices = true)]
[ExposeServices(typeof(IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService))]
public class Service1ApplicationConfigurationAppService : AbpApplicationConfigurationAppService, IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService
{ ... }

This override resides somewhere in the external library and is present optionally in the projects.

Later on we decided to add something on top and thus we are creating another override. The point is to have it on top, i.e. to override the functionality of the existing implementation whichever it is - initial AbpApplicationConfigurationAppService or Service1ApplicationConfigurationAppService or some other override.

[ExposeServices(typeof(IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService))]
public class Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService : IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService
{
    private readonly IServiceProvider _serviceProvider;
    private readonly IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService _currentAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService;

    public Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
    {
        _serviceProvider = serviceProvider;
        //We are supposed to have only two IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService implementations here: the current service
        //and either the original AbpApplicationConfigurationAppService or its override
        _currentAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService = _serviceProvider.GetServices&lt;IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService&gt;().FirstOrDefault(x => x.GetType() != typeof(Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService));
    }
}

This does not work - it causes some circular dependency issues. I've tried various approaches and nothing still works.

In some cases Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService constructor is not invoked at all, I don't know why. I have

context.Services.AddTransient&lt;IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService, ModuleIconApplicationConfigurationAppService&gt;()

at place. And of course, I want Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService to be on top of the existing service, not Service1ApplicationConfigurationAppService to replace Service2ApplicationConfigurationAppService, for instance.

Liming Ma 29 weeks ago

hi Alexander Nikonov

You shouldn't get IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService from DI in an implemented instance of IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService. This will cause a circular dependency issue.

If you want to perform some logic when getting a service from DI. You can use factory methods.

Maybe your case is not a dependency injection problem. What is your purpose for replacing IAbpApplicationConfigurationAppService ?

Have a good day.

Alexander Nikonov 29 weeks ago

You encouraged me to look for an alternative solution and looks liked it's really possible here - using Application Configuration Contributor. I hope it will work as expected. Regarding a factory approach: I will keep this in mind for future. Thank you.