Why not lump all service classes into a Factory method (instead of injecting interfaces)?

Posted by Andrew on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andrew
Published on 2010-03-25T07:21:35Z Indexed on 2010/03/25 7:33 UTC
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We are building an ASP.NET project, and encapsulating all of our business logic in service classes. Some is in the domain objects, but generally those are rather anemic (due to the ORM we are using, that won't change). To better enable unit testing, we define interfaces for each service and utilize D.I.. E.g. here are a couple of the interfaces:

IEmployeeService
IDepartmentService
IOrderService
...

All of the methods in these services are basically groups of tasks, and the classes contain no private member variables (other than references to the dependent services). Before we worried about Unit Testing, we'd just declare all these classes as static and have them call each other directly. Now we'll set up the class like this if the service depends on other services:

public EmployeeService : IEmployeeService
{
   private readonly IOrderService _orderSvc;
   private readonly IDepartmentService _deptSvc;
   private readonly IEmployeeRepository _empRep;

   public EmployeeService(IOrderService orderSvc
                        , IDepartmentService deptSvc
                        , IEmployeeRepository empRep)
   {
      _orderSvc = orderSvc;
      _deptSvc = deptSvc;
      _empRep = empRep;
   }
   //methods down here
}

This really isn't usually a problem, but I wonder why not set up a factory class that we pass around instead?

i.e.

public ServiceFactory
{
   virtual IEmployeeService GetEmployeeService();
   virtual IDepartmentService GetDepartmentService();
   virtual IOrderService GetOrderService();
}

Then instead of calling:

_orderSvc.CalcOrderTotal(orderId) 

we'd call

_svcFactory.GetOrderService.CalcOrderTotal(orderid)

What's the downfall of this method? It's still testable, it still allows us to use D.I. (and handle external dependencies like database contexts and e-mail senders via D.I. within and outside the factory), and it eliminates a lot of D.I. setup and consolidates dependencies more.

Thanks for your thoughts!

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