Auto Injection Interfaces

Any VuFind plugin accessed through a standard plugin interface can implement certain “-Aware” interfaces in order to be automatically injected with dependencies. This is a convenient way to gain access to other elements of the VuFind system.

Here are the relevant interfaces:

• \Laminas\Log\LoggerAwareInterface - Get access to the VuFind\Log\Logger service
• \VuFind\Db\Table\DbTableAwareInterface - Get access to the VuFind\Db\Table\PluginManager service
• \VuFind\I18n\Translator\TranslatorAwareInterface - Get access to the Laminas\Mvc\I18n\Translator service
• \VuFindHttp\HttpServiceAwareInterface - Get access to the VuFindHttp\HttpService service
• \ZfcRbac\Service\AuthorizationServiceAwareInterface - Get access to the authorization service (for permission checks)

Starting with VuFind 2.4, Traits are provided which can be used in addition to interfaces to automatically implement interface-specific methods (and in some case, useful related utility methods). These Traits can help to reduce redundancy in your code:

• \VuFind\Db\Table\DbTableAwareTrait
• \VuFind\I18n\Translator\TranslatorAwareTrait
• \VuFindHttp\HttpServiceAwareTrait
• \VuFind\Log\LoggerAwareTrait
• \ZfcRbac\Service\AuthorizationServiceAwareInterface

As the framework behind VuFind has evolved, auto-injection has been recognized as an anti-pattern in many situations, and it is now largely discouraged. Thus, some related capabilities have been scaled back or removed.

• \Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceLocatorAwareTrait used to trigger auto-injection of the top-level service manager. As of VuFind 4.0, it is no longer supported.
• You used to be able to implement a setPluginManager() method as an alternative to implementing the \Zend\ServiceManager\ServiceLocatorAwareInterface; the result was the same. Support for setPluginManager was removed starting with VuFind 5.0.
• In VuFind 7.0, all Zend services were renamed to Laminas services because of the rebranding of the framework.