Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)

This principle states two essential things:

1. High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.

2. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend on abstractions.

This can be hard to understand at first, but if you’ve worked with Angular, you’ve seen an implementation of this principle in the form of Dependency Injection (DI). While they are not identical concepts, DIP keeps high-level modules from knowing the details of its low-level modules and setting them up. It can accomplish this through DI. A huge benefit of this is that it reduces the coupling between modules. Coupling is a very bad development pattern because it makes your code hard to refactor.

DIP is usually achieved by a using an inversion of control (IoC) container. An example of a powerful IoC container for TypeScript is InversifyJs

Bad:

import { readFile as readFileCb } from 'fs';
import { promisify } from 'util';

const readFile = promisify(readFileCb);

type ReportData = {
  // ..
};

class XmlFormatter {
  parse<T>(content: string): T {
    // Converts an XML string to an object T
  }
}

class ReportReader {
  // BAD: We have created a dependency on a specific request implementation.
  // We should just have ReportReader depend on a parse method: `parse`
  private readonly formatter = new XmlFormatter();

  async read(path: string): Promise<ReportData> {
    const text = await readFile(path, 'UTF8');
    return this.formatter.parse<ReportData>(text);
  }
}

// ...
const reader = new ReportReader();
const report = await reader.read('report.xml');

Good:

import { readFile as readFileCb } from 'fs';
import { promisify } from 'util';

const readFile = promisify(readFileCb);

type ReportData = {
  // ..
};

interface Formatter {
  parse<T>(content: string): T;
}

class XmlFormatter implements Formatter {
  parse<T>(content: string): T {
    // Converts an XML string to an object T
  }
}

class JsonFormatter implements Formatter {
  parse<T>(content: string): T {
    // Converts a JSON string to an object T
  }
}

class ReportReader {
  constructor(private readonly formatter: Formatter) {}
  async read(path: string): Promise<ReportData> {
    const text = await readFile(path, 'UTF8');
    return this.formatter.parse<ReportData>(text);
  }
}

// ...
const reader = new ReportReader(new XmlFormatter());
const report = await reader.read('report.xml');

// or if we had to read a json report
const reader = new ReportReader(new JsonFormatter());
const report = await reader.read('report.json');