Initial Dagger setup

Let’s change our example to actually use Dagger to create an instance of CommandRouter. We’ll start by creating a @Component interface:

@Component
interface CommandRouterFactory {
  CommandRouter router();
}

CommandRouterFactory is a normal factory type for CommandRouters. Its implementation would call new CommandRouter() instead of our main method doing it. But instead of us writing the implementation of CommandRouterFactory, we can annotate it with @Component to have Dagger generate an implementation for us: DaggerCommandRouterFactory. Note that it has a static create() method to give us an instance to use.

class CommandLineAtm {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
    CommandRouterFactory commandRouterFactory =
        DaggerCommandRouterFactory.create();
    CommandRouter commandRouter = commandRouterFactory.router();

    while (scanner.hasNextLine()) {
      Status unused = commandRouter.route(scanner.nextLine());
    }
  }
}

In order for Dagger to know how to create a CommandRouter, we also need to add an @Inject annotation to its constructor:

final class CommandRouter {
  ...
  @Inject
  CommandRouter() {}
  ...
}

The @Inject annotation indicates to Dagger that when we ask for a CommandRouter, Dagger should call new CommandRouter().

Aside: See these instructions for how to properly add Dagger to your build.

We haven’t done much special yet, but we have the bare minimum for a Dagger application! Run the application again to see it in action.

CONCEPTS

• @Component tells Dagger to implement an interface or abstract class that creates and returns one or more application objects.
  • Dagger will generate a class that implements the component type. The generated type will be named DaggerYourType (or DaggerYourType_NestedType for nested types)
• @Inject on a constructor tells Dagger how to instantiate that class. We’ll see more shortly.