ComponentFactory vs Dependency Injection

[SkyeHoefling]

The ComponentFactory is an implementation of the Factory Pattern that has been available in DNN for quite a long time. Has anyone looked at how this will grow with DNN Dependency Injection? I would argue that the ComponentFactory should be deprecated and replaced with Dependency Injection as most if not all of the features in the factory are available in a more streamlined approach with Dependency Injeciton.

I took a look through the GitHub issues and didn't see anything documented for this. Any change to the ComponentFactory will need to be a delicate change that should follow current deprecation guidelines. This would be large breaking change for enterprise solutions

[bdukes]

I don't think anyone's documented this yet. I had wondered if we could implement the ComponentFactory API on top of the DI container, but haven't gone down the road of trying any of that.

[SkyeHoefling]

I haven't tried a line of code yet on this, but I think we can safely swap out the ComponentFactory implementation to use DI. All the ComponentFactory is map types and implementations and hold it in memory when the DNN App starts up. This is why I think it would be safe to swap the implementation and then we could deprecate the ComponentFactory.

I'll write up an issue on this so we can get it documented

[SkyeHoefling]

Added #3955 to the issue backlog