Maintaining state

There’s a bug in our code—do you spot it? It’s subtle, so you may need to look closely.

In order to help find it, let’s first create a deposit command:

final class DepositCommand implements Command {
  private final Database database;
  private final Outputter outputter;

  @Inject
  DepositCommand(Database database, Outputter outputter) {
    this.outputter = outputter;
    this.database = database;
  }

  @Override
  public Result handleInput(List<String> input) {
    if (input.size() != 2) {
      return Result.invalid();
    }

    Account account = database.getAccount(input.get(0));
    account.deposit(new BigDecimal(input.get(1)));
    outputter.output(account.username() + " now has: " + account.balance());
    return Result.handled();
  }
}

Let’s try adding this command with a @Binds @IntoMap method like the commands above. Let’s put it in a module called UserCommandsModule that will hold all of the commands that deal with a specific user.

@Module
abstract class UserCommandsModule {
  @Binds
  @IntoMap
  @StringKey("deposit")
  abstract Command depositCommand(DepositCommand command);
}

Don’t forget to add UserCommandsModule in the @Component annotation of CommandRouterFactory. Run the application with the following commands:

deposit colin 2
login colin

The second command shows that colin has a balance of 0. How could that be?

To help make this clearer, add System.out.println("Creating a new " + this); statements to the Database, LoginCommand, and DepositCommand constructors. Rerun the application and you’ll see that two databases are being created. Dagger by default provides one Database object when LoginCommand requests it and another when DepositCommand requests it.

In order to tell Dagger that they both need to share the same instance of Database, we annotate the Database class with @Singleton. We also annotate our @Component type with @Singleton to declare that instances of classes annotated with @Singleton should be shared among other objects that depend on them in this component.

@Singleton
final class Database { ... }

@Singleton
@Component
interface CommandRouterFactory {
  ...
}

Try rerunning again. Now the login and deposit commands share a single Database instance.

CONCEPTS

• @Singleton instructs Dagger to create only one instance of the type for each instance of the component. It can be used on the class declaration of a type that has an @Inject constructor, or on a @Binds or @Provides method.
• It’s not yet clear why you have to annotate the component with @Singleton as well, but it will become clearer later.