Spring.NET with MVC3 (Razor)

Question

I'm experimenting with ASP.NET MVC3 Razor and I'm fairly impressed. This is the way we'll go.

We use Spring.NET for dependency injection in our framework and I wonder, if it is possible to use it for MVC3 projects as well?

The documentation of Spring.NET is only talking about MVC2, but I guess there will be MVC3 support in future release. Nonetheless I was trying to get it work though. With no success so far.

So my question is, if someone else found a way or workaround or trick to do dependency injection in MVC3 using Spring.NET and if so, how?

I know this is a very general question, but even a honest "sorry this is definitely not possible" or "it should work without any modifications" would help me a lot.

Thanks in advance, Jan

Answer 1

Yes, even though the the latest Spring.NET release (1.3.1) has explicit support for MVC2, it can also be (pretty easily) used to support MVC3. The IDependencyResolver interface introduced with MVC3 makes IoC integration significantly more straightforward than it had been in the past (offering just one single interception/pluggability point for type resolution where previously there had been multiple places you needed to intercept type resolution calls).

See blog posts like this one: http://blog.alexkyprianou.com/2011/03/07/using-spring-net-with-mvc-3/ for more information and suggestions on how you might go about doing this (its really quite simple compared to the effort/complexity of doing so with MVC1 and MVC2.

Answer 2

It should work without modifications.

After some more investigation and help of colleages I found out, that Spring.NET works with MVC3 - at least as far as I can see it now. My orignal problem was a misformatted xml-file for my injection objects (I didn't post the code in the question).

Still there seem to be issues with object scopes. The scope request doesn't seem to work, since all my objects are still singletons and once created, can not handle more than one request.

I tried to add the well-known attribute singleton="false" and it worked somehow, so my objects will now be created on every request. Good!

However I found out, that Spring.NET's example Spring.MvcQuickStart.2010 also uses the singleton attribute with value false, so probably this is the correct way (and true by default).

I don't know yet, how to handle the session scope, but at least my web application works for requests (singleton="false") and application-wide (no singleton attribute) with Spring.NET and MVC3.

Best, Jan