Question

I’m using a factory to create different concrete instances of an interface. One of the concrete instances depends on a service that would normally be injected. The life-cycle of the service is managed by the container. In this case is it OK to inject the container into the factory?

Answer 1

I would let the container resolve an abstract factory, factory interface, or factory delegate and inject that into consumers instead.

The factory can then take the service as a dependency, which the factory will resolve.

Update based on comments:

If you’re injecting the service into the factory, won’t the same
instance of that service be passed to each object the factory creates?

Yes, each object created by the factory would get the same instance of the service (which is normally what I want). If that’s not what you want, inject a service factory into the factory. Some containers offer support for automatically resolving factory delegates, so you might be able to inject Func<IFooService>.

But then the life-cycle of the service is bound to the life-cycle of
the factory

As @SebastianWeber mentioned in the comments, that is not a restriction of all containers. Also, consider if it matters. You could pick the shortest of the two lifespans and use that for both.