How to avoid Service Locator Anti-Pattern?

Question

I'm trying to remove a Service Locator from an abstract base class, but I'm not sure what to replace it with. Here is a psuedo-example of what I've got:

public abstract class MyController : Controller
{
    protected IKernel kernel;
    public MyController(IKernel kernel) { this.kernel = kernel); }

    protected void DoActions(Type[] types)
    {

        MySpecialResolver resolver = new MySpecialResolver(kernel);
        foreach(var type in types)
        {
            IMyServiceInterface instance = resolver.Get(type);
            instance.DoAction();
        }
    }
}

The problem with this is that the instanciator of a derived class doesn't know what bindings the kernel must have in order to keep MySpecialResolver from throwing an exception.

This might be intrinsicly intractable because I don't know from here which types I'll have to resolve. The derived classes are responsible for creating the types parameter, but they aren't hardcoded anywhere. (The types are based on the presence of attributes deep within the derived class's composition hierarchy.)

I've trying to fix this with lazy loading delegates, but so far I haven't come up with a clean solution.

Update

There are really two issues here, one is that the IoC container is passed to the controller, acting as a service locator. This is easy to remove--you can move the location up or down the call stack using all sorts of techniques.

The second issue is the difficult one, how can you ensure that the controller has the necessary services when the requirements aren't exposed until runtime. It should have been obvious from the start: you can't! You will always be dependent upon either the state of the service locator or contents of a collection. In this particular case no amount of fiddling will ever resolve the problem described in this article with staticly typed dependencies. I think that what I'm going to end up doing is passing a Lazy array into the controller constructor and throwing an exception if a required dependency is missing.

Answer 1

Maybe you should just do away the Kernel, Types and MySpecialResolver and let the subclasses call DoActions with the IMyServiceInterface instances they need as argument directly. And let the subclasses decide how they get to these instances - they should know best (or in case they don't know which exactly the one who ever decides which instances of IMyServiceInterface are needed)