Why won't Ninject resolve protected properties in a base class?

Question

Simple question I guess, but I've spent an hour trying to get a base class for my controllers to have a few services injected via property injection. The properties were scoped protected at first, but the objects kept coming back null, once I changed the scope to public it worked. Is there anyway to have the properties be protected and get the IoC to work?

Here is my setup.

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    [Inject]
    protected LoggingInterface.ILogger<BaseController> Logger { set; get; }

    [Inject]
    protected IRepository Repository { set; get; }

    protected override void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext)
    {
        ....

        base.OnAuthorization(filterContext);
    }
}

and the boot-strapper in the NinjectMVC3 App_Start

    private static void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel)
    {
        kernel.Bind(typeof(LoggingInterface.ILogger<>)).To(typeof(Log4NetLogger<>));
        kernel.Bind<IRepository>().To<Repository>();
        kernel.Bind<IUserService>().To<UserService>();
    } 

Thank you, Stephen

Answer 1

You cannot inject into properties that do not have public setter. Both your Logger and Repository properties are protected so no way for Ninject to assign them a value. You will have to change their setter visibility if you want to achieve this. Or use constructor injection. While this would make perfect sense for the repository property which seems required it wouldn't make sense for the logger property. So I guess you will have to make it public.

Answer 2

Pretty sure the InjectNonPublic flag on the NinjectSettings allows you to configure it to do what you want - closest link I can find quickly

Whether it's going to be supported for any significant length of time, I don't know - injecting privates is just a bad idea (along with Property Injection and associated scoundrels :P)