Tag: DI

Dependency Injection Containers with PHP. When Pimple is not enough.

~ Gonzalo Ayuso ~ 22 Comments

Two months ago I wrote an article about Dependency Injection with PHP and Pimple. After the post I was speaking about it with a group of colleagues and someone threw a question:

What happens if your container grows up? Does Pimple scale well?

The answer is not so easy. Pimple is really simple and good for small projects, but it becomes a little mess when we need to scale. Normally when I face a problem like that I like to checkout the Symfony2 code. It usually implements a good solution. There’s something I really like from Symfony2: it’s a brilliant component library and we can use those components within our projects instead of using the full stack framework. So why don’t we only use the Dependency Injection component from SF2 instead Pimple to solve the problem? Let’s start:

We are going to use composer to load our dependencies so we start writing our composer.json file. We want to use yaml files so we need to add “symfony/yaml” and “symfony/config” in addition to “symfony/dependency-injection”:

{
    "require": {
        "symfony/dependency-injection": "dev-master",
        "symfony/yaml": "dev-master",
        "symfony/config": "dev-master"
    },
    "autoload":{
        "psr-0":{
            "":"lib/"
        }
    },
}

Now we can run “composer install” command and we already have our vendors and our autolader properly set.

We are going to build exactly the same example than in the previous post:

<?php
class App
{
    private $proxy;

    public function __construct(Proxy $proxy)
    {
        echo "App::__construct\n";
        $this->proxy = $proxy;
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        return $this->proxy->hello();
    }
}

class Proxy
{
    private $curl;

    public function __construct(Curl $curl)
    {
        $this->curl = $curl;
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        echo "Proxy::__construct\n";
        return $this->curl->doGet();
    }
}

class Curl
{
    public function doGet()
    {
        echo "Curl::doGet\n";
        return "Hello";
    }
}

Now we create our file “services.yml” describing our dependency injection container behaviour:

services:
  app:
    class:     App
    arguments: [@Proxy]
  proxy:
    class:     Proxy
    arguments: [@Curl]
  curl:
    class:     Curl

and finally we can build the script:

<?php
include __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";

use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;
use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Loader\YamlFileLoader;

$container = new ContainerBuilder();
$loader = new YamlFileLoader($container, new FileLocator(__DIR__));
$loader->load('services.yml');

$container->get('app')->hello();

IMHO is as simple a Pimple but much more flexible, customizable and it’s also well documented. For example we can split our yaml files into different ones and load them:

<?php
include __DIR__ . "/vendor/autoload.php";

use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;
use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Loader\YamlFileLoader;

$container = new ContainerBuilder();
$loader = new YamlFileLoader($container, new FileLocator(__DIR__));
$loader->load('services1.yml');
$loader->load('services2.yml');
$container->get('app')->hello();

An we also can use imports in our yaml files:

imports:
  - { resource: services2.yml }
services:
  app:
    class:     App
    arguments: [@Proxy]

If you don’t like yaml syntax and you prefer XML (I know. It looks insane :)) you can use it, or even programatically with PHP.

What do you think?

Source code in github (see the README to install the vendors)

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Building a simple Dependency Injection Container with PHP

~ Gonzalo Ayuso ~ 19 Comments

If you are looking for a small Dependency Injection Container with PHP maybe you need have look to Pimple.

Pimple is a small Dependency Injection Container for PHP 5.3 that consists of just one file and one class (about 50 lines of code).

Now, keeping with my aim of reinvent the wheel, we will create a simple Dependency Injection Container basically to understand how does it work. Let’s start.

First of all: Do we really need a Dependency Injection Container (DIC)? If you are asking yourself this question, maybe you need to have look to Fabien Poetencier’s article.

We are going to work with a teorical problem like this:

Imagine we are going to build a service that uses one external REST API. We define your application with three classes:

  • App. The main application.
  • Proxy The part of the application that speaks with the external API
  • Curl. One curl wrapper to perform our http connections to the REST API

Our first approach can be:

<?php
class App
{
    private $proxy;

    public function __construct()
    {
        echo "App::__construct\n";
        $this->proxy = new Proxy();
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        return $this->proxy->hello();
    }
}

class Proxy
{
    private $curl;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->curl = new Curl();
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        echo "Proxy::__construct\n";
        return $this->curl->doGet();
    }
}

class Curl
{
    public function doGet()
    {
        echo "Curl::doGet\n";
        return "Hello";
    }
}

$app = new App();
echo $app->hello();

If we execute the script:

php example1.php 

App::__construct
Proxy::__construct
Curl::doGet
Hello

It works but we have one problem. Our application is strongly coupled. As we can see App creates a new instance of Proxy within the constructor and Proxy creates a new instance of Curl. That’s a problem especially if we want to use TDD. What happens if we want to mock Curl requests to test the application without using the real external service?. Dependency injection can help us here. We can change our application to:

<?php
class App
{
    private $proxy;

    public function __construct(Proxy $proxy)
    {
        echo "App::__construct\n";
        $this->proxy = $proxy;
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        return $this->proxy->hello();
    }
}

class Proxy
{
    private $curl;

    public function __construct(Curl $curl)
    {
        $this->curl = $curl;
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        echo "Proxy::__construct\n";
        return $this->curl->doGet();
    }
}

class Curl
{
    public function doGet()
    {
        echo "Curl::doGet\n";
        return "Hello";
    }
}


$app = new App(new Proxy(new Curl()));
echo $app->hello();

The outcome is exactly the same but now we can easily use mocks and use different configurations depending on the environment. Maybe your testing development does not have access to the real REST server.

Now our application isn’t coupled but as we can see our Dependency Injection becomes a mess. That’s one problem with DI. It’s pretty straightforward to inject simple things but when we have dependencies over a set of classes that’s becomes a difficult task. Because of that we can use Dependency Injection Containers.

If we choose Pimple as Dependency Injection Container we can refactor our application to:

<?php
class App
{
    private $proxy;

    public function __construct(Pimple $container)
    {
        echo "App::__construct\n";
        $this->proxy = $container['Proxy'];
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        return $this->proxy->hello();
    }
}

class Proxy
{
    private $curl;

    public function __construct(Pimple $container)
    {
        $this->curl = $container['Curl'];
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        echo "Proxy::__construct\n";
        return $this->curl->doGet();
    }
}

class Curl
{
    public function doGet()
    {
        echo "Curl::doGet\n";
        return "Hello";
    }
}

require_once 'Pimple.php';

$container = new Pimple();
$container['Curl'] = function ($c) {return new Curl();};
$container['Proxy'] = function ($c) {return new Proxy($c);};

$app = new App($container);
echo $app->hello();

But what is my problem with Pimple? Basically my problem is that my IDE cannot autocomplete correctly $container is an instance of Pimple not the “real” instance. OK It instantiated on demand the classes but it’s done at runtime and the IDE don’t know about that. We can solve it using an extra PHPDoc to give hints to the IDE but we also can use a different approach. Instead of using Pimple we can use this script:

<?php
class App
{
    private $proxy;

    public function __construct(Container $container)
    {
        echo "App::__construct\n";
        $this->proxy = $container->getProxy();
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        echo "App::hello\n";
        return $this->proxy->hello();
    }
}

class Proxy
{
    private $curl;

    public function __construct(Container $container)
    {
        echo "Proxy::__construct\n";
        $this->curl = $container->getCurl();
    }

    public function hello()
    {
        return $this->curl->doGet();
    }
}

class Curl
{
    public function doGet()
    {
        echo "Curl::doGet\n";
        return "Hello";
    }
}

class Container
{
    public function getProxy()
    {
        return new Proxy($this);
    }

    public function getCurl()
    {
        return new Curl();
    }
}

$app = new App(new Container());
echo $app->hello();

The idea is the same than Pimple but now we have created our custom Dependency Injection Container without extending any library and now our IDE will autocomplete the fucntion names without problems. If we want to share objects instead creating new ones each time we call the factory function of the container we can change a little bit our Container (the same way than Pimple::share) with a simple singleton pattern:

class Container
{
    static $proxy;
    public function shareProxy()
    {
        if (NULL === self::$proxy) self::$proxy = new Proxy($this);
        return self::$proxy;
    }

    public function getCurl()
    {
        return new Curl();
    }
}

And that’s all. What do you think?

Inject dependencies via PhpDoc

~ Gonzalo Ayuso ~ 6 Comments

Last month I attended to Codemotion conference. I was listening to a talk about Java and I saw the “@inject” decorator. I must admit I switched off my mind from the conference and I started to take notes in my notebook. The idea is to implement something similar in PHP. It’s a pity we don’t have real decorators in PHP. I really miss them. We need to use PhpDoc. It’s not the same than real decorators in other programming languages. That’s my prototype. Let’s go.

Imagine this simple class:

class User
{
    private $db;

    public function getInfo($uid)
    {
        $sql = "select * from users where uid=:UID";
        $stmp = $this->db->prepare($sql);
        $stmp->execute(array('UID' => $uid));
        return $stmp->fetchAll();
    }

    public function getDb()
    {
        return $this->db;
    }
}

It doesn’t work. Private property $db must be an instance of PDO object. We can solve it with dependency injection:

class User
{
    private $db;
    public function __construct(PDO $db)
    {
        $this->db = $db;
    }

    public function getInfo($uid)
    {
        $sql = "select * from users where uid=:UID";
        $stmp = $this->db->prepare($sql);
        $stmp->execute(array('UID' => $uid));
        return $stmp->fetchAll();
    }
}

Now it works but we are going to create a simple PDO Wrapper to obtain the PDO connection. 

class DbConf
{
    const DB1 = 'db1';

    private static $conf = array(
        self::DB1 => array(
            'dsn'  => 'pgsql:dbname=db;host=localhost',
            'user' => 'gonzalo',
            'pass' => 'password',
        )
    );

    public static function getConf($key)
    {
        return self::$conf[$key];
    }
}

class Db extends PDO
{
    private static $dbInstances = array();

    /**
     * @static
     * @param string $key
     * @return PDO
     */
    static function getDb($key)
    {
        if (!isset($dbInstances[$key])) {
            $dbConf = DbConf::getConf($key);
            $dbInstances[$key] = new PDO($dbConf['dsn'], $dbConf['user'], $dbConf['pass']);
        }
        return $dbInstances[$key];
    }
}

I like to use this kind of classes because I normally work with different databases and I need to use different connection depending on the SQL. It helps me to mock the database connection within the different environments (development, production, QA). Now We can use our simple class:

$user = new User(Db::getDb(DbConf::DB1));
print_r($user->getInfo(4));

The idea is to change the class into something like this:

class User extends DocInject
{
    /**
     * @inject Db::getDb(DbConf::DB1)
     * @var PDO
     */
    private $db;

    public function getInfo($uid)
    {
        $sql = "select * from users where uid=:UID";
        $stmp = $this->db->prepare($sql);
        $stmp->execute(array('UID' => $uid));
        return $stmp->fetchAll();
    }
}

Now we are going to inject the PDO connection to $db private property in the constructor:

class DocInject
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $reflection = new ReflectionClass($this);
        foreach ($reflection->getProperties() as $property) {
            /** @var ReflectionProperty $property */
            $docComment = $property->getDocComment();
            $docComment = preg_replace('#[ \t]*(?:\/\*\*|\*\/|\*)?[ ]{0,1}(.*)?#', '$1', $docComment);
            $docComment = trim(str_replace('*/', null, $docComment));
            foreach (explode("\n", $docComment) as $item) {
                if (strpos($item, '@inject') !== false) {
                    $inject = trim(str_replace('@inject', null, $item));
                    $value = null;
                    eval("\$value = {$inject};"); // yes, eval. uggly, isnt't?
                    $property->setAccessible(true);
                    $property->setValue($this, $value);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

If you have read “Clean Code” (if not, you must do it) you noticed that uncle Bob doesn’t like this class. The method is too long, so we are going to refactor a little bit.

class DocInject
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $reflection = new ReflectionClass($this);
        foreach ($reflection->getProperties() as $property) {
            $this->processProperty($property);
        }
    }

    private function processProperty(ReflectionProperty $property)
    {
        $docComment = $this->cleanPhpDoc($property->getDocComment());
        foreach (explode("\n", $docComment) as $item) {
            if ($this->existsInjectDecorator($item)) {
                $this->performDependencyInjection($property, $item);
            }
        }
    }

    private function cleanPhpDoc($docComment)
    {
        $docComment = preg_replace('#[ \t]*(?:\/\*\*|\*\/|\*)?[ ]{0,1}(.*)?#', '$1', $docComment);
        $docComment = trim(str_replace('*/', null, $docComment));
        return $docComment;
    }

    private function existsInjectDecorator($item)
    {
        return strpos($item, '@inject') !== false;
    }

    private function performDependencyInjection(ReflectionProperty $property, $item)
    {
        $injectString = $this->removeDecoratorFromPhpDoc($item);
        $value = $this->compileInjectString($injectString);
        $this->injectValueIntoProperty($property, $value);
    }

    private function removeDecoratorFromPhpDoc($item)
    {
        return trim(str_replace('@inject', null, $item));
    }

    private function compileInjectString($injectString)
    {
        $value = null;
        eval("\$value = {$injectString};"); // yes, eval. uggly, isnt't?
        return $value;
    }

    private function injectValueIntoProperty(ReflectionProperty $property, $value)
    {
        $property->setAccessible(true);
        $property->setValue($this, $value);
    }
}

So now we don’t need to pass the new instance of PDO connection in the constructor with DI:

$user = new User();
print_r($user->getInfo(4));

It works but there’s something that I don’t like. We need to extend our User class with DocInject. I like plain classes. Because of that we are going to use the new feature of PHP5.4: traits

Instead of extend our class with DocInject we are going to create:

trait DocInject
{
    public function parseDocInject()
    {
        $reflection = new ReflectionClass($this);
        foreach ($reflection->getProperties() as $property) {
            $this->processProperty($property);
        }
    }

    private function processProperty(ReflectionProperty $property)
    {
        $docComment = $this->cleanPhpDoc($property->getDocComment());
        foreach (explode("\n", $docComment) as $item) {
            if ($this->existsInjectDecorator($item)) {
                $this->performDependencyInjection($property, $item);
            }
        }
    }

    private function cleanPhpDoc($docComment)
    {
        $docComment = preg_replace('#[ \t]*(?:\/\*\*|\*\/|\*)?[ ]{0,1}(.*)?#', '$1', $docComment);
        $docComment = trim(str_replace('*/', null, $docComment));
        return $docComment;
    }

    private function existsInjectDecorator($item)
    {
        return strpos($item, '@inject') !== false;
    }

    private function performDependencyInjection(ReflectionProperty $property, $item)
    {
        $injectString = $this->removeDecoratorFromPhpDoc($item);
        $value = $this->compileInjectString($injectString);
        $this->injectValueIntoProperty($property, $value);
    }

    private function removeDecoratorFromPhpDoc($item)
    {
        return trim(str_replace('@inject', null, $item));
    }

    private function compileInjectString($injectString)
    {
        $value = null;
        eval("\$value = {$injectString};"); // yes, eval. uggly, isnt't?
        return $value;
    }

    private function injectValueIntoProperty(ReflectionProperty $property, $value)
    {
        $property->setAccessible(true);
        $property->setValue($this, $value);
    }
}

And now:

class User
{
    use DocInject;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->parseDocInject();
    }

    /**
     * @inject Db::getDb(DbConf::DB1)
     * @var PDO
     */
    private $db;

    public function getInfo($uid)
    {
        $sql = "select * from users where uid=:UID";
        $stmp = $this->db->prepare($sql);
        $stmp->execute(array('UID' => $uid));
        return $stmp->fetchAll();
    }
}

This implementation has a little problem. If our class User needs a constructor we have a problem. As far as I know we cannot use parent::__construct() with a trait. We can solve this problem changing the code a little bit:

class User
{
    use DocInject {parseDocInject as __construct;}

    /**
     * @inject Db::getDb(DbConf::DB1)
     * @var PDO
     */
    private $db;

    public function getInfo($uid)
    {
        $sql = "select * from users where uid=:UID";
        $stmp = $this->db->prepare($sql);
        $stmp->execute(array('UID' => $uid));
        return $stmp->fetchAll();
    }
}

A simple unit test

    public function testSimple()
    {
        $user = new User();
        $this->assertTrue(count($user->getInfo(4)) > 0);
    }

If we use different DbConf file for each environment we can easily use one database or another without changing any line of code.

And that’s all. What do you think?

(Files available as gist here and here)