How to inject the database connection into a custom service?

Question

I have a custom module that pulls data from several different external databases that have been defined as connections in settings.php. The current setup includes a series of controllers that have a service I have created called DataAccess injected into them. My DataAccess service has several methods that accept a $schema parameter and based on this I use the following each time:

$connection = Database::getConnection('default', $schema);

I can then query each database as needed with this setup. I thought about injecting Database into my service from the Drupal container, but I would then need a base class like ControllerBase's create method to get that service in the first place. What would be the correct way to do this as it isn't a controller - would I use a different base class here? I am new to Drupal 8 development and trying to ensure I am following the best practices, but at the same time I don't want to overcomplicate things.

Any advice?

Answer 1

You can't inject Drupal\Core\Database\Database, it's a container of static functions, constants, & variables for core database functions.

If you'd like to inject the Connection object, that is be possible, and is more like something you want (unless you have scenario where setting.php is dynamic an all possible values of $schema can't be known).

You can follow the example Drupal sets with the default @database class in core.services.yml:

  database:
    class: Drupal\Core\Database\Connection
    factory: Drupal\Core\Database\Database::getConnection
    arguments: [default]

In your mymodule.services.yml you can define the factory/arguments for each database connection you have, plus your DataAccess service class with the injected connections.

services:
  mymodule.database_schema:
    class: Drupal\Core\Database\Connection
    factory: Drupal\Core\Database\Database::getConnection
    arguments: [default, schema]
  mymodule.database_schema2:
    class: Drupal\Core\Database\Connection
    factory: Drupal\Core\Database\Database::getConnection
    arguments: [default, schema2]
  mymodule.data_access:
    class: Drupal\mymodule\DataAccess
    arguments: ['@mymodule.database_schema', '@mymodule.database_schema2']

From there you can store the database connections in DataAccess's constructor and reference them as required by DataAccess's methods.

Answer 2

As commented on another answer, the answer here is probably, you can't.

The database API isn't fully converted to use services. I tried to do it for quite some time, in https://www.drupal.org/node/1811730, but didn't succeed and neither did others.

So, for now, you need to use the static methods. The best you can do is wrap it in a method or another service that does just that to simplify mocking it when you want to write unit tests.

Answer 3

At this moment I'm using this code to inject the database service:

*.services.yml

services:
  onlyone:
    class: Drupal\onlyone\OnlyOne
    arguments: ['@entity_type.manager', '@database', '@language_manager']

Drupal\onlyone\OnlyOne

use Drupal\Core\Entity\EntityTypeManagerInterface;
use Drupal\Core\Database\Connection;
use Drupal\Core\Language\LanguageManagerInterface;

  /**
   * {@inheritdoc}
   */
  public function __construct(EntityTypeManagerInterface $entity_type_manager, Connection $connection, LanguageManagerInterface $language_manager) {
    $this->entityTypeManager = $entity_type_manager;
    $this->connection = $connection;
    $this->languageManager = $language_manager;
  }