Dependency injection not working custom form

Question

I have a custom module with a form class, where I am trying to inject a custom service to use within it's submit method:

namespace Drupal\my_module\Form;

use Drupal\Core\Form\FormBase;
use Drupal\Core\Form\FormStateInterface;
use Drupal\my_module\CustomManager;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerInterface;

class CustomForm extends FormBase{

  private $custom_manager;

  function __construct(CustomManager $custom_manager) {
    $this->custom_manager = $custom_manager;
  }

  public static function create(ContainerInterface $container) {
    return new static(
    // Load the service required to construct this class.
      $container->get('my_module.manager')
    );
  }

  .....

  public function submitForm(array &$form, FormStateInterface $form_state) {          
      // Test service.
      $this->custom_manager->test();
  }

} 

When I submit the form, I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function test() on null

It seems like my custom service hasn't been instantiated as expected, since the $custom_manager property is null.

Strange thing is when I debug the constructor, the service IS being instantiated properly.

Has anyone had this issue before? I can instantiate the service via the global Drupal class, but apparently doing the dependency injection is best practice.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I accidentally declared the $custom_manager property of my class as private instead of protected, and that's why I was unable to access the custom manager object in the form submission method. Whoops!

MPD's answer is theoretically correct though, as class requiring to access services do need to implement the ContainerInjectionInterface class.

Worth noting though that the class FormBase which we're extending, already implements ContainerInjectionInterface, so we don't need to explicitly do so when creating a custom form.

Answer 2

Not 100% sure this is the problem, but anything with dependencies needs to implement ContainerInjectionInterface in one way or another (directly or inherited via the parent class). So, your problem is likely that you need to do

use Drupal\Core\DependencyInjection\ContainerInjectionInterface;

class CustomForm extends FormBase implements ContainerInjectionInterface {
  // ...
}

That way it will be picked up via discovery by the ClassResolver and have the ::create() method called. Just make sure you do a drush cr (or equivalent) to make sure everything gets wired up properly.