How does injecting a concrete class expose implementation?

Question

I've read that you should pass in an interface instead of a concrete implementation so that the consumer doesn't need to know anything about implementation details.

I don't understand how injecting a concrete class exposes implementation details?

class ServiceA() {
   private something
public method1(){
     res = doSomething(this.something)
     res = doSomethingElse()
     return res; 
  }
}
interface Service {
   method1(): something
}

How does injecting ServiceA expose anything about the implementation? The consumer would still only have access to method1 right?

candied_orange · Answer 1 · 2023-01-24T17:20:32.637

The prohibition is against directly depending on a concrete type not against injecting one. It's mentioned in the Dependency Inversion Principle.

It says rather than doing this:

You should do this:

You can do that while injecting Mechanism into Policy just fine. The point is, statically, Policy should have no idea what is going to be injected. All it knows is that it'll be some Mechanism like thingy. Knowing that tells Policy how to talk to it. But that doesn't tell Policy what the Mechanism will do about what it is told because Policy doesn't, statically, know which Mechanism this even is. That hides the implementation details.

All of that is defeated if Policy constructs Mechanism itself and so knows exactly which Mechanism it's depending on. That would be "directly depending".

Something else constructing Mechanism and injecting it into Policy is fine so long as Policy knows no more about it than what the interface tells it.

^{This may sound like you need the keyword interface but really you just need some kind of abstraction. Which is nice because some languages don't even have that keyword.}

gnasher729 · Answer 2 · 2023-01-24T07:30:30.507

A class may implement several interfaces. So access to one interface only allows access to that one interface, access to the class would allow access to all interfaces.

Whether that is “access to the implementation” is dubious, but it is definitely access to more functionality than needed. But the question is strange: The consumer would define the type of object it consumes. If it is declared to consume an interface, any class would actually be reduced to that interface in the call. The consumer would never see the class. Now if the consumer declared that it wants some class, that’s just a daft thing to do.

How does injecting a concrete class expose implementation?

2 Answers2