Question

There’s something I just don’t get about guice: According to what I’ve read so far, I’m supposed to use the Injector only in my bootstrapping class (in a standalone application this would typically be in the main() method), like in the example below (taken from the guice documentation):

public static void main(String[] args) {
    /*
     * Guice.createInjector() takes your Modules, and returns a new Injector
     * instance. Most applications will call this method exactly once, in their
     * main() method.
     */
    Injector injector = Guice.createInjector(new BillingModule());

    /*
     * Now that we've got the injector, we can build objects.
     */
    RealBillingService billingService = injector.getInstance(RealBillingService.class);
    ...
  }

But what if not all Objects I ever need can be created during startup? Maybe I want to respond to some user interaction when the application is running? Don’t I have to keep my injector around somewhere (e.g. as a static variable) and then call injector.getInstance(SomeInterface.class) when I need to create a new object?

Of course spreading calls to Injector.getInstance() all over the place seems not to be desirable.

What am I getting wrong here?

Answer 1

Yes, you basically only should use the Injector to create get the instance for the root-object. The rest of the application shouldn’t touch the Guice-Container. As you’ve noticed, you still need to create some objects when required. There are different approaches for doing that, each suitable for different needs.

Inject a Provider
Provider is a interface from Guice. It allows you to request a new instance of a object. That object will be created using Guice. For example.

 class MyService{
     private Provider<Transaction> transactionProvider;
     public MainGui(Provider<Transaction> transactionProvider){
         this.transactionProvider = transactionProvider;
     }

     public void actionStarted(){
         Transaction transaction = transactionProvider.get();
     }

Build a Factory
Often you need some kind of factory. This factory uses some injected services and some parameters and creates a new object for you. Then you use this factory for new instances. Then you inject that factory and use it. There also help for this with the AssistedInject-extension

I think with these two possibilities you rarely need to use the Guice-Injector itself. However sometimes is still appropriate to use the injector itself. Then you can inject the Injector to a component.