Is testability alone justification for dependency injection?
- by fearofawhackplanet
The advantages of DI, as far as I am aware, are:
Reduced Dependencies
More Reusable Code
More Testable Code
More Readable Code
Say I have a repository, OrderRepository, which acts as a repository for an Order object generated through a Linq to Sql dbml. I can't make my orders repository generic as it performs mapping between the Linq Order entity and my own Order POCO domain class.
Since the OrderRepository by necessity is dependent on a specific Linq to Sql DataContext, parameter passing of the DataContext can't really be said to make the code reuseable or reduce dependencies in any meaningful way.
It also makes the code harder to read, as to instantiate the repository I now need to write
new OrdersRepository(new MyLinqDataContext())
which additionally is contrary to the main purpose of the repository, that being to abstract/hide the existence of the DataContext from consuming code.
So in general I think this would be a pretty horrible design, but it would give the benefit of facilitating unit testing. Is this enough justification? Or is there a third way? I'd be very interested in hearing opinions.
