Typescript Dependency Injection and Decorators

By Germain Bergeron — February 04, 2016

In July 2015, Microsoft announced the release of Typescript 1.5, introducing decorators, based on the ES7 decorator proposal. I had to test it!

It should be noted that decorators are still in stage 1 proposal and their actual implementation could change anytime

This article will demonstrate the possibility of using decorators to do dependency injection in Typescript.

Why use injection?

Injection avoids the pollution of the global namespace with object instances.
It provides an easy way to share an object instance across our application, without the need to pass the object everywhere.

In our constantly growing Single Page Application, we have some objects that are constants through a user visit. E.g., the visitor’s browser and the logged User. The first offers us some utility methods like browser.isMobile() or browser.isIE(). The second which contains a set of permissions, email, etc., is used, among other things, to determine which panels the user can access.
The injected object is always up-to-date.

We use Backbone to periodically refresh our models with the state from the server. Our injector allows us to create the instance once and use it where we need it.

Implementation

I made a simple project on GitHub that provides the Injector and decorator. Feel free to contribute!

It’s also available on npm: npm install dose.

It uses a small registry that stores values in a map. There’s a lot to improve in there, but it met my requirements.

export default class Injector {

    private static registry: {[key: string]: any} = {};

    static getRegistered(key: string): any {
        var registered = Injector.registry[key];
        if (registered) {
            return registered;
        } else {
            throw new Error(`Error: ${key} was not registered.`);
        }
    }

    static register(key: string, value: any) {
        var registered = Injector.registry[key];
        if (registered) {
            throw new Error(`Error: ${key} is already registered.`);
        }
        Injector.registry[key] = value;
    }
}

The Injector can now be used like this:

/* FileA.ts */
import User from 'User';
import Injector from 'Injector';

/* Register the User */
let instance = new User('John', 'Smith', 25);
Injector.register('user', instance);

/* Register Application Settings */
let settings = {DEBUG: false};
Injector.register('settings', settings);

/* FileB.ts */ 
import Injector from 'Injector';

function test() {
    let user = <User>Injector.getRegistered('user');
    console.log(user.name);
}
test();

It works and it’s far from magic. We must cast the registered value in User because getRegistered returns an object of type any.

Enters the decorator

First, let’s look at the simpler injector:

function injectProperty(...keys: string[]) {
    return (target: any, property: string) => {
        target[property] = Injector.getRegistered(keys[0]);
    };
}

In this code, target is the object instance on which we want to inject and key is the property. Let’s see the usage:

class UserConsumer {
    @inject('user')
    private user: User;
}

target => UserConsumer

property => user

keys[0] => ‘user’

The injectorMethod does about the same but accept 1…N keys instead of one.

class UserConsumer {
    @injectorMethod ('user', 'settings')
    getUserAge(offset: number, user?: User, settings?: any) {
        if (settings.DEBUG) {
            console.log('Getting user age');
        }
        return offset + user.age;
    }
}

Note that it adds parameters to the methods. I have yet to make it work directly in the method parameters

Nice! But we can do better. We don’t want to have a decorator for the method and another for the property. Let’s wrap them with a small function that detects the type, so we can use @inject('key') on both methods and parameters

export function inject(...keys: string[]) {
    return (...args: any[]) => {
        var params = [];
        for(var i=0;i<args.length; i++){
            args[i] ? params.push(args[i]) : null;
        }
        switch (params.length) {
            case 2:
                return injectProperty(keys[0]).apply(this, args);
            case 3:
                return injectMethod(...keys).apply(this, args);
            default:
                throw new Error("Decorators are not valid here!");
        }
    };
}

Here’s the complete UserConsumer code. A small demo project is available on GitHub.

import {inject} from '../node_modules/dose/dist/Dose';
import User from './User';
import InjectableKeys from './InjectableKeys';

export default class UserConsumer {

    @inject(InjectableKeys.User)
    private user: User;

    @inject(InjectableKeys.Settings)
    private settings: {DEBUG: boolean};

    @inject(InjectableKeys.User, InjectableKeys.Settings)
    getUserAge(user?: User, settings?: {DEBUG: boolean}) {
        if (settings.DEBUG) {
            console.log('Getting user age');
        }
        return user.age;
    }

    getUserName() {
        console.log(this.settings);
        if (this.settings.DEBUG) {
            console.log('Getting user name');
        }
        return this.user.name;
    }
}

The official Typescript decorator page has a lot more information on what is possible with the decorators.

Try it

Create a npm projet that depends on dose & Typescript >= 1.5. Then you can run npm install to download the dependencies.

Import the injector & the inject decorator and you are all set!

Be sure to pass the –experimentalDecorators flag to your typescript compiler

That’s it!

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Typescript Dependency Injection and Decorators

Why use injection?

Implementation

Enters the decorator

Try it