Dependency injection for objects not emmitted from component factory?

[jasperblues]

I'm thinking of supporting something like Spring's "@configurable" annotation that allows dependency injection of an object that gets instantiated outside of the Typhoon component factory?

This is useful in the following kinds of scenarios:

• When looking up controllers via a StoryBoard
• When looking up fat (ie non-aneamic) model objects from a persistent storage.

Of course there are always workarounds - such as providing an injector on DAO object or using the injectWithDependencies hook after resolving from a story board. . . but would this be a nice feature?

I'm thinking of a global:

[MyModelOrControllerClass configureWithFactory:someFactoryOrAssembly]; 

and from their on in, any instantiation of this class would have dependencies injected. . . I guess these would have to use property injection.

Thoughts? Worth it?

[ratkins]

We need something that's kind of the other way around.

Using Storyboards (via this technique), UIStoryboard instantiates an instance of our HomeScreenViewController and Typhoon injects its properties.

But we have other objects in our Typhoon assemblies that need access to the navigationViewController property of the HomeScreenViewController that Storyboards created for us. There's no way to tell Typhoon, "Hey, when anybody asks for a UINavigationController, give 'em this instance".

[jasperblues]

The other way around is pretty simple actually. . . We can just use the UIStoryBoard as a factory for emitting other objects. . I will set up an example in the next 24 hours.

[ratkins]

It's a little trickier than you may think: we've solved it by introducing a Typhoon-managed proxy object that returns (UINavigationController *)[UIApplication sharedApplication].keyWindow.rootViewController; it needs to be a proxy as the rootViewController isn't set when Typhoon is doing its thing (the UIStoryBoard hasn't created/wired it up yet.)

[jasperblues]

Sounds simple enough to me. . want to contribute that back?

[ratkins]

It's literally that line of code wrapped up in a class. I'll write it up as a gist to illustrate the technique if you like. It still feels like a nasty workaround to me though.

[jasperblues]

Sure that would be helpful. . . meanwhile are you asking about having StoryBoard produced objects to participate as components in the Typhoon assembly? I have some other ideas there. . .

[ratkins]

Gistified. And yeah, that's what I'm interested in.

(It may turn out to be that I'm wanting to do something that I shouldn't want to do, too...)

[jasperblues]

Closing in favor of more clearly defined #206