Circular dependency - Injecting objects that are directly depended on each other

Question

I have used Dice PHP DI container for quite a while and it seems the best in terms of simplicity of injecting dependencies.

From Dice Documentation:

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Answer 1

As mentioned on your post on the Dice github ( https://github.com/TomBZombie/Dice/issues/7 ), the only way to resolve without removing the circular dependency is to refactor one of the classes to use setter injection:

class A {
    public $b;

    public function __construct(B $b) {
        $this->b = $b;
    }
}


class B {
    public $a;

    public function setA(A $a) {
        $this->a = $a;
    }
}

This allows the objects to be constructed:

$b = new B();
$a = new A($b);
$b->setA($a);

With the original code:

class A {
    public $b;

    public function __construct(B $b) {
        $this->b = $b;
    }
}

class B {
    public $a;

    public function __construct(A $a) {
        $this->a = $a;
    }
}

You cannot construct it and run into the same problem as the container:

$b = new B(new A(new B(new A(new B(.............))))

The problem with having a container work around this issue using a hack such as ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor is that your objects are now dependent on creation logic which uses this method. You essentially couple the code to the container which is a poor design as your code is now no longer portable and cannot be used without the container to perform the object construction.