A Reminder to Take Care when Registering Dependencies

I looked into a “fun” little problem yesterday where we were seeing occasional errors in some of our ASP.NET Core code which calls down into the ASP.NET Core Identity UserManager. We were getting a range of NullReferenceException and ObjectDisposedExceptions as well as various exceptions from Npgsql.NpgsqlConnection (we use Postgres rather than SQL in this project) stating things such as “Connection already open”.

The issue was presenting itself within some authentication and authorisation code we have which wraps and extends the ASP.NET Core Identity UserManager and SignInManager functionality. We use ASP.NET Identity over a PostGres database for our user store but include some application specific functionality with our own code. We have our own AuthenticationManager and UserManager classes, both of which take dependencies on the underlying Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity classes.

These originally got registered in in the ConfigureServices method of the Startup.cs class as follows:

services.AddSingleton<IAuthenticationManager, AuthenticationManager>();
services.AddSingleton<IUserManager, UserManager>();

The constructor for our AuthenticationManager looks a bit like this:

public AuthenticationManager(UserManager<ApplicationUser> userManager, SignInManager<ApplicationUser> signInManager)
{
   // setup our authentication manager here
}

Do you see the problem?

The issue here is the singleton registration. While our classes themselves have no state and could be shared between requests, the dependencies on Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.UserManager<T> and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.SignInManager<T> have to be considered.

If we take a look at where these are registered within the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity source we can see the following:

services.TryAddScoped<UserManager<TUser>, UserManager<TUser>>();
services.TryAddScoped<SignInManager<TUser>, SignInManager<TUser>>();

They are added using the scoped lifetime which means they expect to be created once per request. They themselves depend on an IUserStore which is registered with the scoped lifetime as well.

As a result, the singleton registration of our AuthenticationManager was trying to hang onto dependencies to objects for the entire application lifetime, where those dependencies only expected to live for the request scope. Sometimes they seemed to get a different database context and hence the “Connection already open” errors we saw. Sometimes the dependencies had been disposed of by the time they got called by our code and as such we saw the various exceptions being thrown. In some cases we seemed to still have access to the UserManager but the context underneath was null. I won’t dive into this tool deeply, but it was apparent that we should really make the registration of our classes scoped as well. This way, they are created once per request, the same as their dependencies. We changed the registration code to the following:

services.AddScoped<IAuthenticationManager, AuthenticationManager>();
services.AddScoped<IUserManager, UserManager>();

This resolved the errors we were seeing immediately. It was an annoying oversight although fortunately it was fairly easy to guess at the cause. The various errors all suggested that we having some issues with the lifetime of the  dependencies. This case has been a reminder to carefully consider the lifetimes of service registrations as it can produce some unexpected errors and behaviour.

The Microsoft documentation even includes a large warning about scoped services – “The main danger to be wary of is resolving a Scoped service from a singleton. It’s likely in such a case that the service will have incorrect state when processing subsequent requests.” – Oh how true this is!

Happy dependency injecting!


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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

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