Resolving Services

After you have your components registered with appropriate services exposed, you can resolve services from the built container and child lifetime scopes. You do this using the Resolve() method:

var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
builder.RegisterType<MyComponent>().As<IService>();
var container = builder.Build();

using(var scope = container.BeginLifetimeScope())
{
  var service = scope.Resolve<IService>();
}

You will notice the example resolves the service from a lifetime scope rather than the container directly - you should, too.

While it is possible to resolve components right from the root container, doing this through your application in some cases may result in a memory leak. It is recommended you always resolve components from a lifetime scope where possible to make sure service instances are properly disposed and garbage collected. You can read more about this in the section on controlling scope and lifetime.

When resolving a service, Autofac will automatically chain down the entire dependency hierarchy of the service and resolve any dependencies required to fully construct the service. If you have circular dependencies that are improperly handled or if there are missing required dependencies, you will get a DependencyResolutionException.

If you have a service that may or may not be registered, you can attempt conditional resolution of the service using ResolveOptional() or TryResolve():

// If IService is registered, it will be resolved; if
// it isn't registered, the return value will be null.
var service = scope.ResolveOptional<IService>();

// If IProvider is registered, the provider variable
// will hold the value; otherwise you can take some
// other action.
IProvider provider = null;
if(scope.TryResolve<IProvider>(out provider))
{
  // Do something with the resolved provider value.
}

Both ResolveOptional() and TryResolve() revolve around the conditional nature of a specific service being registered. If the service is registered, resolution will be attempted. If resolution fails (e.g., due to lack of a dependency being registered), you will still get a DependencyResolutionException. If you need conditional resolution around a service where the condition is based on whether or not the service can successfully resolve, wrap the Resolve() call with a try/catch block.

Additional topics for resolving services:

You may also be interested in checking out the list of advanced topics to learn about named and keyed services, working with component metadata, and other service resolution related topics.