Problem Statment
I am learning Angular 4 and I have stumble upon a code where @Inject
is being used in a constructor
and I am not able to figure out why...
Code and Source
I am using Angular 4 Material
Code Source: https://material.angular.io/components/dialog/overview
In the code, they are injecting MAT_DIALOG_DATA
constructor(public dialogRef: MatDialogRef<DialogOverviewExampleDialog>,
@Inject(MAT_DIALOG_DATA) public data: any
) { }
Can anyone please elaborate what does it mean and when/where should we do this?
@Inject()
is a manual mechanism for letting Angular know that a
parameter must be injected.
import { Component, Inject } from '@angular/core';
import { ChatWidget } from '../components/chat-widget';
@Component({
selector: 'app-root',
template: `Encryption: {{ encryption }}`
})
export class AppComponent {
encryption = this.chatWidget.chatSocket.encryption;
constructor(@Inject(ChatWidget) private chatWidget) { }
}
In the above we've asked for chatWidget
to be the singleton Angular
associates with the class
symbol ChatWidget
by calling
@Inject(ChatWidget)
. It's important to note that we're using
ChatWidget
for its typings and as a reference to its singleton.
We are not using ChatWidget
to instantiate anything, Angular does
that for us behind the scenes
From https://angular-2-training-book.rangle.io/handout/di/angular2/inject_and_injectable.html
If MAT_DIALOG_DATA
is a non-factory/class dependency (like string
for your configs), you usually use @Inject
.
Also check InjectionToken
: https://angular.io/guide/dependency-injection#injectiontoken
One solution to choosing a provider token for non-class dependencies is to define and use an InjectionToken
Here's a plunker: http://plnkr.co/edit/GAsVdGfeRpASiBEy66Pu?p=preview
if you remove @Inject
in these cases you will receive a
Can't resolve all parameters for ComponentName: (?)
IoC container in Angular uses the type declarations in the constructor to determine the objects to be injected to the constructor parameters.
In your example, "public data: any
" parameter could not be determined by its type declaration because it's defined as "any". In order to solve this problem, you have to use "@Inject(MAT_DIALOG_DATA)
" decorator to inform the IoC container about the object that must be injected to "data
" parameter.
Also in your example, "@Inject
" decorator is used with an InjectionToken
to complicate things a little more :)
An InjectionToken
is actually a class which is used to name the objects to be used by IoC container to inject in to other classes. Normally you could use any classes name as a token for IoC injection (like "MatDialogRef<DialogOverviewExampleDialog>
" in your example) and this works fine. But when you start writing your UnitTests you realize that you need to use Mock objects instead of real objects to be injected into your classes and when you use real class names as your tokens, you could not do that.
To solve this problem you could use Interfaces
as token names and this is actually the right solution, but since JavaScript does not support interfaces you could not use Interface
names as tokens, because transpiled code does not contain Interface
definitions.
As a result of all this, you need to use InjectionToken
. An InjectionToken
allows you to inject any object into your constructor. You just need to declare it in your modules and map to the real class that you want to be injected. This way you could use different classes for your production and test codes.