A while back I covered off How to resolve Sitecore commands & pipelines from IoC. This I have used to great effect, to the point I can’t remember the last time I wrote a pipeline entry with a parameter-less constructor. This in itself has aided Unit Testing of pipelines so much I would consider it a must for all Sitecore development.

Recently however, I was faced with an instance where I now had to resolve two near identical items from my IoC container. In a regular .net application, I would simply use the named component functionality of the container and resolve at least one of my instances using such a name. In the case of Sitecore though – I didn’t have any more parameters to play with, and I mistakenly thought I only had the type name.

On closer investigation (and re-reading my own blog post) I noticed that it is simply an identifier NOT a fully qualified reference, meaning I could stuff in whatever I liked – down goes the shed door and cue the music…..

Below is a modified version of the same basic prisn is what I came up with for the original post, this time – you can now add a | (pipe) character and follow it with the name of the component from your IoC container. I have used Castle Windsor for this example, but the principle would work for pretty much any main stream IoC container (I may even write a version for Agnostic IoC ;).

using System;
using Castle.Windsor;
using Sitecore.Reflection;

namespace MyNamespace
{
    public class WindsorFactory : IFactory
    {
        private static readonly IWindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer();

        public static IWindsorContainer Container
        {
            get { return container; }
        }
        public object GetObject(string identifier)
        {
            if (identifier.IndexOf("|", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) >= 0)
            {
                return GetNamed(identifier);
            }

            return GetDefault(identifier);
        }

        private static object GetDefault(string identifier)
        {
            Type type = Type.GetType(identifier);
            return Container.Resolve(type);
        }

        private static object GetNamed(string identifier)
        {
            var elems = identifier.Split('|');
            string typeName = elems[0];
            string name = elems[1];
            Type type = Type.GetType(typeName);
            return Container.Resolve(name, type);
        }
    }
}

Your pipeline entry then looks something like this, where ‘demo’ is the name of the component you have registered.

<processor mode="on" ref="MyNamespace.PrismDataProvider, MyNamespace|demo" factory="WindsorFactory"/>

Hope this helps

Additional Reading

• Using your own IoC container with Glass Mapper
• Agnostic IoC
• Glass Mapper using Autofac, StructureMap and Unity