c# - IOptions Injection

Question

It seems to me that it's a bad idea to have a domain service require an instance of IOptions<T> to pass it configuration. Now I've got to pull additional (unnecessary?) dependencies into the library. I've seen lots of examples of injecting IOptions all over the web, but I fail to see the added benefit of it.

Why not just inject that actual POCO into the service?

    services.AddTransient<IConnectionResolver>(x =>
    {
        var appSettings = x.GetService<IOptions<AppSettings>>();

        return new ConnectionResolver(appSettings.Value);
    });

Or even use this mechanism:

        AppSettings appSettings = new AppSettings();

        Configuration.GetSection("AppSettings").Bind(appSettings);

        services.AddTransient<IConnectionResolver>(x =>
        {      
             return new ConnectionResolver(appSettings.SomeValue);
        });

Usage of the settings:

public class MyConnectionResolver 
{
     // Why this?
     public MyConnectionResolver(IOptions<AppSettings> appSettings)
     {
           ... 
     }

     // Why not this?
     public MyConnectionResolver(AppSettings appSettings)
     {
           ... 
     }
     
     // Or this
     public MyConnectionResolver(IAppSettings appSettings)
     {
           ... 
     }
}

Why the additional dependencies? What does IOptions buy me instead of the old school way of injecting stuff?

Answer 1

Technically nothing prevents you from registering your POCO classes with ASP.NET Core's Dependency Injection or create a wrapper class and return the IOption<T>.Value from it.

But you will lose the advanced features of the Options package, namely to get them updated automatically when the source changes as you can see in the source here.

As you can see in that code example, if you register your options via services.Configure<AppSettings>(Configuration.GetSection("AppSettings")); it will read and bind the settings from appsettings.json into the model and additionally track it for changes. When appsettings.json is edited, and will rebind the model with the new values as seen here.

Of course you need to decide for yourself, if you want to leak a bit of infrastructure into your domain or pass on the extra features offered by the Microsoft.Extensions.Options package. It's a pretty small package which is not tied to ASP.NET Core, so it can be used independent of it.

The Microsoft.Extensions.Options package is small enough that it only contains abstractions and the concrete services.Configure overload which for IConfiguration (which is closer tied to how the configuration is obtained, command line, json, environment, azure key vault, etc.) is a separate package.

So all in all, its dependencies on "infrastructure" is pretty limited.