So I had a difficult problem today where I needed to access a service but I couldn’t inject it due to the service having slightly too many concerns and hence a circular dependency in the Dependency Injection. So there is right way of dealing with this, which is to refactor the concerns of the collaborator until the dependency goes away. Unfortunately there is also the incomplete user journey that is holding everyone up unless a quick hacky fix is found.

Enter function passing to the rescue! In my case we are talking about an MVC web application where the Model is generating the circular dependency but it is possible to inject the collaborator into the Controller. The trouble is that my code separates the concerns of the Controller and the Model such that the Controller asks the Model to perform an operation and the Model returns the result of executing the operation. This is clean to develop and read but it also means that the Controller cannot access any of the internal operations of the Model, which is what I need for the invocation of the collaborator.

For a moment I thought I had to break the encapsulation between the two and pass the internal information of the Model operation out with the operation result, however function passing is a more elegant solution that keeps my concerns separate. Essentially the Controller will ask the Model to do something and also provide a function for the Model to execute if it wishes to invoke the collaborator.

Let’s try to illustrate this in code

class Controller (stuff: StuffRepository, messages : MessageDispatcher) {

post("/handle/stuff/:stuffId") {

def messageCallback(id: StuffId, message : Message) { messages.send(Messages.StuffUpdated, message, Some(id)) }

stuff.storeChange(params("stuffId"), messageCallback) }}

class StuffRepository {

def storeChange(id : String, callback : (StuffId, Message) => Unit) = {

makeChanges(id) match {

case Success => callback(StuffId(id), Message("Changes completed")) ; Success

case Failure => Incomplete }}

Hopefully that’s all relatively obvious, you can also type the callback for clarity and make it an Option if you don’t always want the callback invoked. If you don’t like the closure you can probably re-write is as a function that partially applies MessageDispatcher and then returns the function.

Some of you are going to be thinking this is totally obvious (particularly if you a Javascript fiend) and that’s cool but I do think it is an interesting technique for keeping responsibilities separated without very complex patterns. It is also something that is only possible with proper first order functions.