In Symfony2, why is it a bad idea to inject the service container, rather than individual services?

Question

I can\'t find the answer to this...

If I inject the service container, like:

// config.yml
my_listener:
   class: MyListener
   arguments: [@service_         


        

Answer 1

Injecting the whole container is not a good idea in general. Well, it works, but why injecting the whole container, while you only need a few other services or parameters.

Sometimes you want to inject the whole container to avoid circular references, because if you inject the whole container, you get "lazy loading" of the services you require. An example would be doctrine entity listeners.

You can get the container from every class that is "Container Aware" or has access to the kernel.