In tutorials and books, I have never seen a single word describing the object that the injected object is injected into. Instead, other terms are used, like “injection point” which don’t denote the object containing the injected object. And nothing I can think of sounds right, except maybe “injection target” – but I have never read it anywhere.
Is there a single word or a simple expression for it, or is it like the “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” from a recent fantasy book series?
0
Wikipedia calls it the “Dependent Consumer,” or simply the “Dependent Object.”
…Dependency injection involves at least three elements:
- a dependent consumer,
- a declaration of a component’s dependencies, defined as interface contracts,
- an injector (sometimes referred to as a provider or container) that creates instances of classes that implement a given dependency interface on request.
The dependent object describes what software component it depends on to do its work. The injector decides what concrete classes satisfy the requirements of the dependent object, and provides them to the dependent.
In conventional software development, the dependent object decides for itself what concrete classes it will use. In the dependency injection pattern, this decision is delegated to the “injector” which can choose to substitute different concrete class implementations of a dependency contract interface at run-time rather than at compile time.
Being able to make this decision at run-time rather than compile time is the key advantage of dependency injection. Multiple, different implementations of a single software component can be created at run-time and passed (injected) into the same test code. The test code can then test each different software component without being aware that what has been injected is implemented differently…
There is no formal name – I usually think about it as the object that needs the dependency.
Call it the dependant object…
1
Container sounds like a perfectly acceptable term to me. EG IThing is injected in to its container
Edit — Comments rightly say that container is already in use in this situation. How about dependee eg The dependency is injected in to its dependee?
2