Framework - IoC Scopes

An essential aspect of developing long-living applications is proper context management. In demonized applications, you are no longer allowed to treat user requests as global singleton object and store references to its instance in your services.

Practically it means that you must explicitly request context while processing user input. Spiral framework simplifies such requests by using global IoC container as context carrier which allows you to call request specific instances as global objects via context bounded scopes.

#Explanation

While processing some user request, the context-specific data is located in the IoC scope, available in the container only for a limited time. Such operation is performed using Spiral\Core\ScopeInterface->runScope method. Default spiral container Spiral\Core\Container implements this interface.

$container->runScope(
    [
        UserContext::class => $user
    ],
    function () use($container) {
        dump($container->get(UserContext::class);
    }
);

Framework will guarantee that scope is clean after the execution, even in case of any exception.

You can receive values set in scope directly from the container or as method injections in your services/controllers while calling then inside the IoC scope:

public function doSomething(UserContext $user)
{
    dump($user);
}

In short, you can receive active context from container or injection inside the IoC scope as you would normally do for any normal dependency, but you must not store it between scopes.

#Context Managers

As mentioned above you are not allowed to store any reference to the scoped instance, the following code is invalid and will cause controller to lock on first scope value:

class HomeController implements SingletonInterface
{
    private $userContext; // not allowed!

    public function __construct(UserContext $userContext)
    {
        $this->userContext = $userContext;
    }
}

Instead, it is recommended to use objects specifically crafted to provide access to IoC scopes from singletons - Context Managers. The simple context manager can be written as follows:

class UserScope
{
    private $container;

    public function __construct(ContainerInterface $container)
    {
        $this->container = $container;
    }

    public function getUserContext(): ?UserContext
    {
        // error checking is omitted
        return $this->container->get(UserContext::class);
    }

    public function getName(): string
    {
        return $this->getUserContext()->getName();
    }
}

You can use this manager in any of your services, including singletons.

class HomeController implements SingletonInterface
{
    private $userScope; // allowed

    public function __construct(UserScope $userManager)
    {
        $this->userScope = $userManager;
    }
}

A good example is Spiral\Http\Request\InputManager. This manager operates as accessor to Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface available only since http dispatcher scope.