Looking for an example for Dagger assisted injection

So, some of the Dagger/Guice folks at Google created a thing called AutoFactory (http://github.com/google/auto) in a project that includes AutoFactory (code-generated assisted injection), AutoValue (code-generated custom value types) and AutoService (auto-generation of java services metadata files).

AutoFactory pretty much operates like you would expect – it generates the factory you would otherwise have hand-rolled. It’s a very early version, and we have a lot more flexibility planned, but it will generate a factory class that will take a type that includes some JSR-330 injectable dependencies and some call-stack parameters, and merge them together in creating instances of the annotated type.

In essence it will generate the factory you wrote, automatically if you properly annotate your factory-created type.

For instance, if you create your class:

@AutoFactory
public class ImageDownloader {
  // Get these dependencies from the injector.
  private final HttpClient httpClient;
  private final ExecutorService executorService;

  // Get these from the caller.
  private final URL imageUrl;
  private final ImageCallback callback;

  ImageDownloader(
      @Provided HttpClient httpClient,
      @Provided ExecutorService executorService,
      ImageCallback callback,
      URL imageUrl) {
    // assignments
  }
}

AutoFactory will generate:

@Generated("com.google.auto.factory.processor.AutoFactoryProcessor")
public final class ImageDownloaderFactory {
  private final Provider<ExampleClasses.HttpClient> httpClientProvider;
  private final Provider<java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService> executorServiceProvider;

  @Inject
  public ImageDownloaderFactory(
      Provider<ExampleClasses.HttpClient> httpClientProvider,
      Provider<java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService> executorServiceProvider) {
    this.httpClientProvider = httpClientProvider;
    this.executorServiceProvider = executorServiceProvider;
  }

  public ImageDownloader create(ImageCallback callback, URL imageUrl) {
    return new ImageDownloader(
        httpClientProvider.get(), 
        executorServiceProvider.get(), 
        callback, 
        imageUrl);
  }
}

(Note, we have a bunch of clean-up to do on the output source, but the above is basically what is generated, though not quite as nicely formatted.)

The resulting class is then, properly a JSR-330 compliant injectable class, which you can inject in your dependency graph (in Dagger or Guice) and it will create these objects for you, co-mingling the call-stack state with the provided dependencies appropriately.

You can inject the above Just-In-Time, or you can provide it via an @Provides method at your leisure.

You can even have the factory implement a factory interface, and then simply bind the two together in a dagger module like so:

@AutoFactory(implementing = MyFactoryInterface.class)
public class ImageDownloader {
  // ... otherwise as above...
}

@Module(...)
class MyModule {
  @Provides MyFactoryInterface factoryImpl(ImageDownloaderFactory impl) {
    return impl;
  }
}