castle windsor doesn't inject dependency into properties

Question

I have asp.net mvc application. I have created a custom membership provider that is bound in web.config like this:

<membership defaultProvider="MyMembershipProvider">
    <providers>
        <clear/>
        <add name="MyMembershipProvider" type="MyProject.Infrastructure.Security.MyMembershipProvider" /> 
    </providers>
</membership>

I use Castle Windsor for IoC. Usually I use the constructor injection something like:

SomeController(ISomething something)
{
  something.do();
  ...
}

I can not use this for the custom membership class because I get an error from web.config that I don't have a parameterless constructor. But if I used a parameterless constructor the object wouldn't be initialized.

So I used property injection like so:

<castle>
    <components>
        <component id="usersRepos" service="MyProject.Core.Repositories.IUserRepository, MyProject.Core" type="MyProject.Data.RepositoryImplementations, MyProject.Data"></component>
    </components>
</castle>

...

public class MyMembershipProvider : MembershipProvider
{ 
    public IUserRepository UserRepository{get; set;}

    public override bool ValidateUser(string username, string password)
    {            
        if (UserRepository.UserExists(username, password))
        {
            return true;
        }

        return false;
    }
}

And I get object reference not found exception because the object (UserRepository) has not been initialized.

Is your class correctly registered? if you try to resolve IUserRepository will it succeed? — Krzysztof Kozmic

Mauricio Scheffer Mauricio Scheffer · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-20T14:13:10

Membership providers can't be managed by Windsor (or at least it seems that nobody bothered to find out how to do it) so they will never get anything injected. See this for a workaround.

UPDATE: I wrote about a better, seamless, workaround

castle windsor doesn't inject dependency into properties

1 Answers