How to dispose top-level IServiceProvider

[khellang]

Since IServiceProvider doesn't implement IDisposable, and ServiceProvider (which does implement it) is internal, how are you supposed to dispose a "top-level service provider", i.e. the result of calling IServiceCollection.BuildServiceProvider()?

I could of course do a (provider as IDisposable)?.Dispose(), but it would be nicer if the interface implemented IDisposable. That way it would work better with generic constraints etc.

I understand that there's little to do with the interface itself, since it's an old interface that's been reused, but would it be possible to add a separate one?

Something along the lines of

namespace Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection
{
    public interface IServiceProvider : System.IServiceProvider, IDisposable { }
}

I think I've gotten around the problem by immediately creating a scope, which is disposable, and use its provider, but I don't think it's a good solution.

What was the reasoning for using the existing interface? And why is everything internal? 😝

[Eilon]

Moving this to Backlog as we are not planning to make any changes for this at this time.

[khellang]

What about an answer and/or close it instead?

[davidfowl]

aspnet/Mvc#3726 (comment)

Nope 😄

[khellang]

I don't get it. Is that the answer? How does that relate to this?

I don't really care about the interface, but there has to be some way to get a hold of the concrete type to call dispose on it, without resorting to casting etc.?

[Eilon]

Yeah not sure what @davidfowl is talking about there...

But the answer for now is that unfortunately we don't have a good answer on this. I think creating a scope immediately is an acceptable workaround in the meantime. This is certainly something we can reconsider.

[davidfowl]

We'd have to expose the concrete type (which we were trying to avoid) from BuildServiceProvider

[davidfowl]

@Eilon we can consider this for 2.0. Make a breaking change to the return value of BuildServiceProvider and make the internal ServiceProvider public.

[Eilon]

Let's do another fun DI triage 😄