Make sure that the controller has a parameterless public constructor error

Question

What's happening is that you're bitten by this problem. Basically, what happened is that you didn't register your controllers explicitly in your container. Unity tries to resolve unregistered concrete types for you, but because it can't resolve it (caused by an error in your configuration), it return null. It is forced to return null, because Web API forces it to do so due to the IDependencyResolver contract. Since Unity returns null, Web API will try to create the controller itself, but since it doesn't have a default constructor it will throw the "Make sure that the controller has a parameterless public constructor" exception. This exception message is misleading and doesn't explain the real cause.

You would have seen a much clearer exception message if you registered your controllers explicitly, and that's why you should always register all root types explicitly.

But of course, the configuration error comes from you adding the second constructor to your DbContext. Unity always tries to pick the constructor with the most arguments, but it has no idea how to resolve this particular constructor.

So the real cause is that you are trying to use Unity's auto-wiring capabilities to create the DbContext. DbContext is a special type that shouldn't be auto-wired. It is a framework type and you should therefore fallback to registering it using a factory delegate:

container.Register<DashboardDbContext>(
    new InjectionFactory(c => new DashboardDbContext())); 

In my case, it was because of exception inside the constructor of my injected dependency (in your example - inside DashboardRepository constructor). The exception was caught somewhere inside MVC infrastructure. I found this after I added logs in relevant places.

I had the same issue and I resolved it by making changes in the UnityConfig.cs file In order to resolve the dependency issue in the UnityConfig.cs file you have to add:

public static void RegisterComponents()    
{
    var container = new UnityContainer();
    container.RegisterType<ITestService, TestService>();
    DependencyResolver.SetResolver(new UnityDependencyResolver(container));
}

I had the same problem. I googled it for two days. At last I accidentally noticed that the problem was access modifier of the constructor of the Controller. I didn’t put the public key word behind the Controller’s constructor.

public class MyController : ApiController
    {
        private readonly IMyClass _myClass;

        public MyController(IMyClass myClass)
        {
            _myClass = myClass;
        }
    }

I add this experience as another answer maybe someone else made a similar mistake.