I am currently using Autofac, but am open to commentary regarding other IOC containers as well. I would prefer a solution using Autofac if possible. I am also somewhat new to IOC so I may be grossly misunderstanding what I should be using an IOC container for.

Basically, the situation is as follows:

I have a topmost IOC container for my app. I have a tree of child containers/scopes where I would like the same "service" (IWhatever) to resolve differently depending on which level in the tree it is resolved. Furthermore if a service is not registered at some level in the tree I would like the tree to be transversed upward until a suitable implementation is found.

Furthermore, when constructing a given component, it is quite possible that I will need access to the parent container/scope. In many cases the component that I m registering will have a dependency on the same or a different service in a parent scope.

Is there any way to express this dependency with Autofac? Something like:

builder.Register(c=>
{
   var parentComponent = ?.Resolve<ISomeService>();
   var childComponent = new ConcreteService(parentComponent, args...);
   return childComponent;
}).As<ISomeService>();

I can t get anything similar to the above pseudocode to work for several reasons:

A) It seems that all levels in the scope tree share a common set of registrations. I can t seem to find a way to make a given registration confined a certain "scope".

B) I can t seem to find a way to get a hold of the parent scope of a given scope. I CAN resolve ILifetimeScope in the container and then case it to a concrete LifetimeScope instance which provides its parent scope, but I m guessing it is probably note meant to be used this way. Is this safe?

C) I m not sure how to tell Autofac which container owns the resolved object. For many components I would like component to be "owned" by the scope in which it is constructed. Could tagged contexts help me here? Would I have to tag every level of the tree with a unique tag? This would be difficult because the tree depth is determined at runtime.

Sorry for the extremely lengthy question. In summary:

1) Is there any way to do what I want to do using Autofac?

2) Is there another container more suited to this kind of dependency structure?

3) Is IOC the wrong tool for this altogether?