Visions In Code

Dear Sitecorians, I hope you are doing good.

Today’s post will be about how to inject(and resolve) “generic” configurations to your Sitecore solution. I got inspired by .Net Core, why not try to implement something similar in an Asp.Net Framework solution.

Thank’s to the great post from Brian – Sitecore Advanced Configuration in .config files, I knew how to proceed 🙂

The idea is to have a sitecore config patch, something like this:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <MyServiceConfiguration type="MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature.Models.MyServiceConfiguration, MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature">
      <SomeIntProperty desc="SomeIntProperty">5</SomeIntProperty>
      <SomeStringProperty desc="SomeStringProperty">bla bla bla</SomeStringProperty>
    </SomeConfiguration>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Then in my class, I would like to resolve the configuration like this:

public class MyService: IMyService 
{
    private readonly IConfigurationResolver<MyServiceConfiguration> _configurationResolver;

    public MyService(IConfigurationResolver<MyServiceConfiguration> configurationResolver)
    {
      _configurationResolver = configurationResolver;
    }

    private int MyIntProperty => _configurationResolver.Configuration.SomeIntProperty;
    private string MyStringProperty => _configurationResolver.Configuration.SomeStringProperty;
}

So how do we do this?

Let’s start by creating the “resolving” part. I want it to be generic, which means it should be easy to add “new” configurations (in my Feature/Foundation layers).

We will create a “resolver”, it should reside in the Foundation layer. The resolver will “resolve” 🙂 whatever POCO class we add. The class should, of course, match its properties with the configuration. The mapping/resolving job is done in factory.CreateObject:

namespace MyApp.Foundation.Configurations.Infrastructure
{
  using System.Xml;
  using Sitecore.Abstractions;

  public class ConfigurationResolver<T> : IConfigurationResolver<T> where T : class
  {
    public T Configuration { get; }

    public ConfigurationResolver(BaseFactory factory)
    {
      XmlNode xmlNode = factory.GetConfigNode(typeof(T).Name);
      Configuration = factory.CreateObject<T>(xmlNode);
    }

  }
}

namespace MyApp.Foundation.Configurations.Infrastructure
{
  public interface IConfigurationResolver<out T>
  {
    T Configuration { get; }
  }
}

Here is the POCO class.

namespace MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature.Models
{
  public class MyServiceConfiguration
  {
    public int SomeIntProperty { get; set; }
    public string SomeStringProperty{ get; set; }
  }
}

And the matching configuration(patch):

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <MyServiceConfiguration type="MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature.Models.MyServiceConfiguration, MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature">
      <SomeIntProperty desc="SomeIntProperty">5</SomeIntProperty>
      <SomeStringProperty desc="SomeStringProperty">bla bla bla</SomeStringProperty>
    </SomeConfiguration>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

The last and very important part is the implementation of the ConfigurationResolver. We will do this in the ServicesConfigurator class. Every “layer project” should have a ServicesConfigurator, we all love dependency injection 😉

namespace MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature.
{

  using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
  using Sitecore.DependencyInjection;
  using MyApp.Foundation.Configurations.Infrastructure;
  using MyApp.Feature.SomeFeature.Models;

  public class ServicesConfigurator : IServicesConfigurator
  {
    public void Configure(IServiceCollection serviceCollection)
    {
      serviceCollection.AddScoped<IConfigurationResolver<MyServiceConfiguration>,ConfigurationResolver<MyServiceConfiguration>>();
    }
  }
}

Notice how we set the MyServiceConfiguration to the ConfigurationResolver.

UPDATE
Mike Reynolds has a better approach.

So I feel your resolver object is superfluous when you can inject the POCO instance hydrated from config directly into your service classes.

I’ve done this recently here using a custom attribute where there is boilerplate code in extension methods on IServiceCollection to hydrate these, and register in the IoC container: https://sitecorejunkie.com/2020/05/16/magically-register-sitecore-configuration-objects-in-the-sitecore-ioc-container-using-a-custom-attribute/

I’ve also done this another way without a custom attribute but in the configurators using a method group: https://sitecorejunkie.com/2018/05/28/service-locate-or-create-objects-defined-in-a-fully-qualified-type-name-field-in-sitecore/

That’s all for now folks 🙂