IHttpClientFactory Patterns: Using Typed Clients from Singleton Services Exploring an approach to reuse transient typed clients within singleton services

I’ve been following IHttpClientFactory for some time and have created a number of blog posts on the various features based on sample applications. Since then; with the release of ASP.NET Core 2.1 now available, I’ve begun using IHttpClientFactory in real production applications. In this post, I want to start covering some patterns I’ve begun to apply as I develop my applications.

This time I want to look at an issue regarding the scope of typed clients. This is based on something I’ve now directly encountered and that was raised as a comment on an earlier post by a reader named Yair.

When defining typed clients in your ConfigureServices method, the typed service is registered with transient scope. This means that a new instance is created by the DI container every time one is needed. The reason this occurs is that a HttpClient instance is injected into the typed client instance. That HttpClient instance is intended to be short lived so that the HttpClientFactory can ensure that the underlying handlers (and connections) are released and recycled.

This works in cases where you plan to consume the typed service from another transient service. A common place to use these in ASP.NET Core will be places such as Controllers for example. That works as expected since the controller is created by the framework for each request.

However, what if you want to use the typed client within a singleton service? That presents a problem. If this was allowed it would be created and injected once, and then held onto by the singleton service. This is not the behaviour we want.

Originally, when asked by Yair about how to use HttpClientFactory in singleton services I suggested instead using the named client approach and then injecting the IHttpClientFactory directly to your singleton service. From there, you can call CreateClient on the factory within methods on that singleton service, so that for each invocation, a new HttpClient is created for only a short lifetime.

The problem is that if we don’t get the typed client behaviour where we can encapsulate the work necessary to interact with a third party API as a service. Instead, we would have to make a service that depends on the IHttpClientFactory as I suggested above and then pass that into the necessary places in our code.

Having now tackled this in a real project where I am essentially building an SDK around an internal API that I’ve developed I have reassessed the options. What I ended up doing was using the typed client approach, but also providing my own factory which can return instances of that typed client. This is actually very simple to do by leveraging the DI service provider directly.

Here is an example of a typed client and its interface:

I won’t dive deeply into how this service works. It’s a typed client and you can read my earlier post about named and typed clients for more information.

In short; this service expects to have a HttpClient instance injected when it is created by the DI container. It then wraps the logic needed to call various endpoints of a remote API. Within this service, we can include the code needed to validate the response and deserialise the returned content from the request.

We can register the typed client in our ConfigureServices method as follows:

At this point, we have a typed client which can be consumed from other transient services and controllers. To make this accessible to singleton services in our application we can add a basic factory.

Here we have created a basic interface for an IConfigurationServiceFactory which defines a single GetConfigurationService method.

The implementation takes an IServiceProvider in its constructor, which will be injected by DI. With access to the service provider, we can use it to return an instance of IConfigurationService from the GetConfigurationService method. As this is a transient typed client, a new instance will be returned each time this method is called.

In ConfigureServices, we can register the factory with DI as a singleton:

As this is a singleton, we can consume this from any class where we need access to an instance of the typed client, even if that class is registered with singleton scope in DI.

The important thing here is that we don’t create an instance of the IConfigurationService and hold onto it for the lifetime of the singleton service. We can hold the IConfigurationServiceFactory and then we must use that whenever a method needs to get access to the IConfigurationService.

I’m sure there may be other ways to achieve similar results but I’m fairly happy with this approach for now.

Related Posts

Part 1 – An introduction to HttpClientFactory
Part 2 – IHttpClientFactory – Defining Named and Typed Clients
Part 3 – IHttpClientFactory – Outgoing request middleware with handlers
Part 4 – IHttpClientFactory – Integrating with Polly for transient fault handling


Have you enjoyed this post and found it useful? If so, please consider supporting me:

Buy me a coffeeBuy me a coffee Donate with PayPal

Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author, 6x Microsoft MVP, and a .NET engineer at Elastic where he maintains the .NET APM agent and related libraries. Steve is passionate about community and all things .NET related, having worked with ASP.NET for over 21 years. Steve enjoys sharing his knowledge through his blog, in videos and by presenting talks at user groups and conferences. Steve is excited to participate in the active .NET community and founded .NET South East, a .NET Meetup group based in Brighton. He enjoys contributing to and maintaining OSS projects. You can find Steve on most social media platforms as @stevejgordon

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *