Not sure if I'm creating a correct lifetime scope

Question

One of my Specflow steps is trying to use a method which takes Autofac's ILifetimeScope as a parameter. This is the method the step is trying to call:

public Client(string clientAddress, ILogger<Client> logger, IFieldDict fieldDict, IdGenerator idGenerator, ILifetimeScope scope);

I don't use Autofac in my Specflow application so am not sure if I'm creating the ILifetimeScope correctly.

I added this to my constructor but am not sure if it's the correct thing to do but my client instance doesn't seem to be getting created correctly.

var containerBuilder = new ContainerBuilder();
container = (Container)containerBuilder.Build();
var lifetimeScope = container.BeginLifetimeScope("KEY");
_iLifetimeScope = lifetimeScope;

Can anybody advise what I might need to do here?

Answer 1

You'll have to register all the dependencies that the Client is resolving from the ILifetimeScope before creating the scope and passing it to the Client constructor.

For example, if the Client is resolving an IService dependency, you could create a mock of this dependency and register it in the container:

var serviceMock = new Mock<IService>();
containerBuilder.RegisterInstance(serviceMock.Object);

var container = containerBuilder.Build();
var lifetimeScope = container.BeginLifetimeScope();

You can then pass the lifetimeScope instance to the Client constructor.

This example is assuming that you are using moq to mock your services. Passing a KEY to the BeginLifetimeScope method is usually not required.

However, depending on how the ILifetimeScope is used in the Client, building the container may be more complicated. It is usually discouraged to inject a ILifetimeScope directly, the required services should be injected instead. There are a lot of ways to inject more complex services, so injecting the ILifetimeScope is usually not required (see Named and Keyed Services, Delegate Factories and Owned Instances).

AutoMock may also be worth a look, it simplifies creating objects with a lot of dependencies, as you don't have to mock every dependency individually.