Question

I’ve got an object that encapsulates remote calls. It needs credentials to make the calls. I think the credentials should be passed into the constructor so that, once the object is created, a user doesn’t have to keep passing them in every time they make a call to the object. This seems like a sensible factoring.

If I do this though I’ve got the added complexity of the clients that use this object needing to be passed a factory instead of the object itself because they credentials won’t be known until run time. So given this extra work, I was wondering if credentials (being just string values and no code) count as a dependency or not?

Does this question even make sense? You see I’ve gotten it into my head after using IoC that anything being passed into a constructor counts as a dependency and thus should probably be an instance of some implementation of an interface.

Answer 1

I wouldn’t see those strings as dependencies. Instead, create an IUserContext or IUserCredentials abstraction that you can inject.