Projections and IoC Services

WARNING

This functionality will only work with projection types that directly implement that IProjection interface. So no usage of EventProjection or the Single/MultiStreamProjection base classes. Aggregation can still be done with CustomAggregation<T, TId> as your base class though.

Many Marten users have had some reason to use services from the current application's Inversion of Control (IoC) container within their projections. While that's always been technically possible, Marten has not had explicit support for this until this feature introduced in 6.2.

Let's say you have a custom aggregation projection like this one below that needs to use a service named IPriceLookup at runtime:

public class ProductProjection: CustomProjection<Product, Guid>
{
    private readonly IPriceLookup _lookup;

    // The lookup service would be injected by IoC
    public ProductProjection(IPriceLookup lookup)
    {
        _lookup = lookup;
        AggregateByStream();
        ProjectionName = "Product";
    }

    public override ValueTask ApplyChangesAsync(
        DocumentSessionBase session,
        EventSlice<Product, Guid> slice,
        CancellationToken cancellation,
        ProjectionLifecycle lifecycle = ProjectionLifecycle.Inline
    )
    {
        slice.Aggregate ??= new Product { Id = slice.Id };

        foreach (var data in slice.AllData())
        {
            if (data is ProductRegistered r)
            {
                slice.Aggregate.Price = _lookup.PriceFor(r.Category);
                slice.Aggregate.Name = r.Name;
                slice.Aggregate.Category = r.Category;
            }
        }

        if (slice.Aggregate != null)
        {
            session.Store(slice.Aggregate);
        }

        return ValueTask.CompletedTask;
    }
}

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Now, we want to use this projection at runtime within Marten, and need to register the projection type while also letting our application's IoC container deal with its dependencies. That can be done with the AddProjectionWithServices<T>() method shown below:

using var host = await Host.CreateDefaultBuilder()
    .ConfigureServices(services =>
    {
        services.AddSingleton<IPriceLookup, PriceLookup>();

        services.AddMarten(opts =>
            {
                opts.Connection(ConnectionSource.ConnectionString);
                opts.DatabaseSchemaName = "ioc";
                opts.ApplyChangesLockId = opts.ApplyChangesLockId + 2;
            })
            // Note that this is chained after the call to AddMarten()
            .AddProjectionWithServices<ProductProjection>(
                ProjectionLifecycle.Inline,
                ServiceLifetime.Singleton
            );
    })
    .StartAsync();

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Note that we're having to explicitly specify the projection lifecycle for the projection used within Marten (Inline vs Async vs Live), and also the ServiceLifetime that governs the projection object's lifetime at runtime.

WARNING

Marten is not using the shared scoped container from ASP.Net Core requests or service bus requests when this runs for inline projections

If the registration is a Singleton, Marten will use the application's IoC container to build the projection object once and add it to Marten's configuration at application start up time. If the registration is Scoped or Transient, Marten uses a proxy wrapper around IProjection that builds the projection object uniquely for each usage through scoped containers, and disposes the inner projection object at the end of the operation.