This chapter covers the Spring Framework's implementation of the Inversion of Control (IoC) [1] principle.
The org.springframework.beans and org.springframework.context packages provide the basis for the Spring Framework's IoC container. The BeanFactory interface provides an advanced configuration mechanism capable of managing objects of any nature. The ApplicationContext interface builds on top of the BeanFactory (it is a sub-interface) and adds other functionality such as easier integration with Spring's AOP features, message resource handling (for use in internationalization), event propagation, and application-layer specific contexts such as the WebApplicationContext for use in web applications.
In short, the BeanFactory provides the configuration framework and basic functionality, while the ApplicationContext adds more enterprise-centric functionality to it. The ApplicationContext is a complete superset of the BeanFactory, and any description of BeanFactory capabilities and behavior is to be considered to apply to the ApplicationContext as well.
This chapter is divided into two parts, with the first part covering the basic principles that apply to both the BeanFactory and ApplicationContext, and with the second part covering those features that apply only to the ApplicationContext interface.
In Spring, those objects that form the backbone of your application and that are managed by the Spring IoC container are referred to as beans. A bean is simply an object that is instantiated, assembled and otherwise managed by a Spring IoC container; other than that, there is nothing special about a bean (it is in all other respects one of probably many objects in your application). These beans, and the dependencies between them, are reflected in the configuration metadata used by a container.
The org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory is the actual representation of the Spring IoC container that is responsible for containing and otherwise managing the aforementioned beans.
The BeanFactory interface is the central IoC container interface in Spring. Its responsibilities include instantiating or sourcing application objects, configuring such objects, and assembling the dependencies between these objects.
There are a number of implementations of the BeanFactory interface that come supplied straight out-of-the-box with Spring. The most commonly used BeanFactory implementation is the XmlBeanFactory class. This implementation allows you to express the objects that compose your application, and the doubtless rich interdependencies between such objects, in terms of XML. The XmlBeanFactory takes this XML configuration metadata and uses it to create a fully configured system or application.
The Spring IoC container
As can be seen in the above image, the Spring IoC container consumes some form of configuration metadata; this configuration metadata is nothing more than how you (as an application developer) inform the Spring container as to how to “instantiate, configure, and assemble [the objects in your application]”. This configuration metadata is typically supplied in a simple and intuitive XML format. When using XML-based configuration metadata, you write bean definitions for those beans that you want the Spring IoC container to manage, and then let the container do it's stuff.
![[Note]](../images/admons/note.png) | Note |
|---|---|
XML-based metadata is by far the most commonly used form of configuration metadata. It is not however the only form of configuration metadata that is allowed. The Spring IoC container itself is totally decoupled from the format in which this configuration metadata is actually written. At the time of writing, you can supply this configuration metadata using either XML, the Java properties format, or programmatically (using Spring's public API). The XML-based configuration metadata format really is simple though, and so the remainder of this chapter will use the XML format to convey key concepts and features of the Spring IoC container. | |
Please be advised that in the vast majority of application scenarios, explicit user code is not required to instantiate one or more instances of a Spring IoC container. For example, in a web application scenario, a simple eight (or so) lines of absolutely boilerplate J2EE web descriptor XML in the web.xml file of the application will typically suffice (see Section 3.8.4, “Convenient ApplicationContext instantiation for web applications”).
At its most basic level, a Spring IoC container configuration consists of the definition of at least one bean that the container must manage, but typically there will be more than one bean definition. When using XML-based configuration metadata, these beans are configured as one or more <bean/> elements inside a top-level <beans/> element.
These bean definitions correspond to the actual objects that make up your application(s). Typically you will have bean definitions for your service layer objects, your data access objects (DAOs), presentation objects such as Struts Action instances, infrastructure objects such as Hibernate SessionFactory instances, JMS Queue references, etc. (the possibilities are of course endless and are limited only by the scope and complexity of your application).
Find below an example of the basic structure of XML-based configuration metadata.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">
<bean id="..." class="...">
<!-- collaborators and configuration for this bean go here -->
</bean>
<bean id="..." class="...">
<!-- collaborators and configuration for this bean go here -->
</bean>
<!-- more bean definitions go here... -->
</beans>Instantiating a Spring IoC container is easy; find below some examples of how to do just that:
Resource resource = new FileSystemResource("beans.xml");
BeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(resource);... or...
ClassPathResource resource = new ClassPathResource("beans.xml");
BeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(resource);... or...
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
new String[] {"applicationContext.xml", "applicationContext-part2.xml"});
// of course, an ApplicationContext is just a BeanFactory
BeanFactory factory = (BeanFactory) context;It can often be useful to split up container definitions into multiple XML files. One way to then load an application context which is configured from all these XML fragments is to use the application context constructor which takes multiple Resource locations. With a bean factory, a bean definition reader can be used multiple times to read definitions from each file in turn.
Generally, the Spring team prefers the above approach, since it keeps container configuration files unaware of the fact that they are being combined with others. An alternate approach is to use one or more occurrences of the <import/> element to load bean definitions from another file (or files). Any <import/> elements must be placed before <bean/> elements in the file doing the importing. Let's look at a sample:
<beans>
<import resource="services.xml"/>
<import resource="resources/messageSource.xml"/>
<import resource="/resources/themeSource.xml"/>
<bean id="bean1" class="..."/>
<bean id="bean2" class="..."/>
</beans>In this example, external bean definitions are being loaded from 3 files, services.xml, messageSource.xml, and themeSource.xml. All location paths are considered relative to the definition file doing the importing, so services.xml in this case must be in the same directory or classpath location as the file doing the importing, while messageSource.xml and themeSource.xml must be in a resources location below the location of the importing file. As you can see, a leading slash is actually ignored, but given that these are considered relative paths, it is probably better form not to use the slash at all.
The contents of the files being imported must be fully valid XML bean definition files according to the Schema or DTD, including the top level <beans/> element.
As mentioned previously, a Spring IoC container manages one or more beans. These beans are created using the instructions defined in the configuration metadata that has been supplied to the container (typically in the form of XML <bean/> definitions).
Within the container itself, these bean definitions are represented as BeanDefinition objects, which contain (among other information) the following metadata:
a package-qualified class name: this is normally the actual implementation class of the bean being defined. However, if the bean is to be instantiated by invoking a static factory method instead of using a normal constructor, this will actually be the class name of the factory class.
bean behavioral configuration elements, which state how the bean should behave in the container (i.e. prototype or singleton, autowiring mode, dependency checking mode, initialization and destruction methods)
constructor arguments and property values to set in the newly created bean. An example would be the number of connections to use in a bean that manages a connection pool (either specified as a property or as a constructor argument), or the pool size limit.
other beans which are needed for the bean to do its work, i.e. collaborators (also called dependencies).
The concepts listed above directly translate to a set of properties that each bean definition consists of. Some of these properties are listed below, along with a link to further documentation about each of them.
Table 3.1. The bean definition
| Feature | Explained in... |
|---|---|
| class | |
| name | |
| scope | |
| constructor arguments | |
| properties | |
| autowiring mode | |
| dependency checking mode | |
| lazy-initialization mode | |
| initialization method | |
| destruction method |
Besides bean definitions which contain information on how to create a specific bean, certain BeanFactory implementations also permit the registration of existing objects that have been created outside the factory (by user code). The DefaultListableBeanFactory class supports this through the registerSingleton(..) method. Typical applications solely work with beans defined through metadata bean definitions, though.
Every bean has one or more ids (also called identifiers, or names; these terms refer to the same thing). These ids must be unique within the container the bean is hosted in. A bean will almost always have only one id, but if a bean has more than one id, the extra ones can essentially be considered aliases.
When using XML-based configuration metadata, you use the 'id' or 'name' attributes to specify the bean identifier(s). The 'id' attribute allows you to specify exactly one id, and as it is a real XML element ID attribute, the XML parser is able to do some extra validation when other elements reference the id; as such, it is the preferred way to specify a bean id. However, the XML specification does limit the characters which are legal in XML IDs. This is usually not a constraint, but if you have a need to use one of these special XML characters, or want to introduce other aliases to the bean, you may also or instead specify one or more bean ids, separated by a comma (,), semicolon (;), or whitespace in the 'name' attribute.
Please note that you are not required to supply a name for a bean. If no name is supplied explicitly, the container will generate a (unique) name for that bean. The motivations for not supplying a name for a bean will be discussed later (one use case is inner beans).
In a bean definition itself, you may supply more than one name for the bean, by using a combination of up to one name specified via the id attribute, and any number of other names via the name attribute. All these names can be considered equivalent aliases to the same bean, and are useful for some situations, such as allowing each component used in an application to refer to a common dependency using a bean name that is specific to that component itself.
Having to specify all aliases when the bean is actually defined is not always adequate however. It is sometimes desirable to introduce an alias for a bean which is defined elsewhere. In XML-based configuration metadata this may be accomplished via the use of the standalone <alias/> element. For example:
<alias name="fromName" alias="toName"/>
In this case, a bean in the same container which is named 'fromName', may also after the use of this alias definition, be referred to as 'toName'.
As a concrete example, consider the case where component A defines a DataSource bean called componentA-dataSource, in its XML fragment. Component B would however like to refer to the DataSource as componentB-dataSource in its XML fragment. And the main application, MyApp, defines its own XML fragment and assembles the final application context from all three fragments, and would like to refer to the DataSource as myApp-dataSource. This scenario can be easily handled by adding to the MyApp XML fragment the following standalone aliases:
<alias name="componentA-dataSource" alias="componentB-dataSource"/> <alias name="componentA-dataSource" alias="myApp-dataSource" />
Now each component and the main app can refer to the dataSource via a name that is unique and guaranteed not to clash with any other definition (effectively there is a namespace), yet they refer to the same bean.
So far as a Spring IoC container is concerned, a bean definition is basically a recipe for creating one or more actual objects. The container looks at the recipe for a named bean when asked, and uses the configuration metadata encapsulated by that bean definition to go off and reflectively create an actual object. This section is thus concerned with communicating to you, the application developer, how you inform a Spring IoC container both what type (or class) of object to instantiate and how to instantiate the resulting object.
If you are using XML-based configuration metadata, you can specify the type (or class) of object that is to be instantiated using the 'class' attribute of the <bean/> element. This 'class' attribute (which internally eventually boils down to being a Class property on a BeanDefinition instance) is normally mandatory (see Section 3.2.3.2.3, “Instantiation using an instance factory method” and Section 3.6, “Bean definition inheritance” for the two exceptions) and is used for one of two purposes. The class property specifies the class of the bean to be constructed in the much more common case where the container itself directly creates the bean by calling its constructor reflectively (somewhat equivalent to Java code using the 'new' operator). In the less common case where the container invokes a static, factory method on a class to create the bean, the class property specifies the actual class containing the static factory method that is to be invoked to create the object (the type of the object returned from the invocation of the static factory method may be the same class or another class entirely, it doesn't matter).
When creating a bean using the constructor approach, all normal classes are usable by and compatible with Spring. That is, the class being created does not need to implement any specific interfaces or be coded in a specific fashion. Just specifying the bean class should be enough. However, depending on what type of IoC you are going to use for that specific bean, you may need a default (empty) constructor.
Additionally, the Spring IoC container isn't limited to just managing true JavaBeans, it is also able to manage virtually any class you want it to manage. Most people using Spring prefer to have actual JavaBeans (having just a default (no-argument) constructor and appropriate setters and getters modeled after the properties) in the container, but it is also possible to have more exotic non-bean-style classes in your container. If, for example, you need to use a legacy connection pool that absolutely does not adhere to the JavaBean specification, Spring can manage it as well.
When using XML-based configuration metadata you can specify your bean class like so:
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"/> <bean name="anotherExample" class="examples.ExampleBeanTwo"/>
The mechanism for supplying arguments to the constructor (if required), or setting properties of the object instance after it has been constructed, will be described shortly.
When defining a bean which is to be created using a static factory method, along with the class attribute which specifies the class containing the static factory method, another attribute named factory-method is needed to specify the name of the factory method itself. Spring expects to be able to call this method (with an optional list of arguments as described later) and get back a live object, which from that point on is treated as if it had been created normally via a constructor. One use for such a bean definition is to call static factories in legacy code.
The following example shows a bean definition which specifies that the bean is to be created by calling a factory-method. Note that the definition does not specify the type (class) of the returned object, only the class containing the factory method. In this example, the createInstance() method must be a static method.
<bean id="exampleBean"
class="examples.ExampleBean2"
factory-method="createInstance"/>The mechanism for supplying (optional) arguments to the factory method, or setting properties of the object instance after it has been returned from the factory, will be described shortly.
In a fashion similar to instantiation via a static factory method, instantiation using an instance factory method is where the factory method of an existing bean from the container is invoked to create the new bean.
To use this mechanism, the 'class' attribute must be left empty, and the 'factory-bean' attribute must specify the name of a bean in the current (or parent/ancestor) container that contains the factory method. The factory method itself must still be set via the 'factory-method' attribute (as seen in the example below).
<!-- the factory bean, which contains a method called createInstance() --> <bean id="myFactoryBean" class="..."> ... </bean> <!-- the bean to be created via the factory bean --> <bean id="exampleBean" factory-bean="myFactoryBean" factory-method="createInstance"/>
Although the mechanisms for setting bean properties are still to be discussed, one implication of this approach is that the factory bean itself can be managed and configured via DI.
A BeanFactory is essentially nothing more than the interface for an advanced factory capable of maintaining a registry of different beans and their dependencies. The BeanFactory enables you to read bean definitions and access them using the bean factory. When using just the BeanFactory you would create one and read in some bean definitions in the XML format as follows:
InputStream is = new FileInputStream("beans.xml");
BeanFactory factory = new XmlBeanFactory(is);Basically that's all there is to it. Using getBean(String) you can retrieve instances of your beans; the client-side view of the BeanFactory is surprisingly simple. The BeanFactory interface has only six methods for client code to call:
boolean containsBean(String): returns true if the BeanFactory contains a bean definition or bean instance that matches the given name
Object getBean(String): returns an instance of the bean registered under the given name. Depending on how the bean was configured by the BeanFactory configuration, either a singleton and thus shared instance or a newly created bean will be returned. A BeansException will be thrown when either the bean could not be found (in which case it'll be a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException), or an exception occurred while instantiating and preparing the bean
Object getBean(String, Class): returns a bean, registered under the given name. The bean returned will be cast to the given Class. If the bean could not be cast, corresponding exceptions will be thrown (BeanNotOfRequiredTypeException). Furthermore, all rules of the getBean(String) method apply (see above)
Class getType(String name): returns the Class of the bean with the given name. If no bean corresponding to the given name could be found, a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException will be thrown
boolean isSingleton(String): determines whether or not the bean definition or bean instance registered under the given name is a singleton (bean scopes such as singleton are explained later). If no bean corresponding to the given name could be found, a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException will be thrown
String[] getAliases(String): Return the aliases for the given bean name, if any were defined in the bean definition
Your typical enterprise application is not made up of a single object (or bean in the Spring parlance). Even the simplest of applications will no doubt have at least a handful of objects that work together to present what the end-user sees as a coherent application. This next section explains how you go from defining a number of bean definitions that stand-alone, each to themselves, to a fully realized application where objects work (or collaborate) together to achieve some goal (usually an application that does what the end-user wants).
The basic principle behind Dependency Injection (DI) is that objects define their dependencies (i.e. the other objects they work with) only through constructor arguments, arguments to a factory method, or properties which are set on the object instance after it has been constructed or returned from a factory method. Then, it is the job of the container to actually inject those dependencies when it creates the bean. This is fundamentally the inverse, hence the name Inversion of Control (IoC), of the bean itself being in control of instantiating or locating its dependencies on its own using direct construction of classes, or something like the Service Locator pattern.
It becomes evident upon usage that code gets much cleaner when the DI principle is applied, and reaching a higher grade of decoupling is much easier when beans do not look up their dependencies, but are provided with them (and additionally do not even know where the dependencies are located and of what actual class they are).
As touched on in the previous paragraph, DI exists in two major variants, namely Setter Injection, and Constructor Injection.
Setter-based DI is realized by calling setter methods on your beans after invoking a no-argument constructor or no-argument static factory method to instantiate your bean.
Find below an example of a class that can only be dependency injected using pure setter injection. Note that there is nothing special about this class... it is plain old Java.
public class SimpleMovieLister {
// the SimpleMovieLister has a dependency on the MovieFinder
private MovieFinder movieFinder;
// a setter method so that the Spring container can 'inject' a MovieFinder
public void setMovieFinder(MovieFinder movieFinder) {
this.movieFinder = movieFinder;
}
// business logic that actually 'uses' the injected MovieFinder is omitted...
}Constructor-based DI is realized by invoking a constructor with a number of arguments, each representing a collaborator. Additionally, calling a static factory method with specific arguments to construct the bean, can be considered almost equivalent, and the rest of this text will consider arguments to a constructor and arguments to a static factory method similarly.
Find below an example of a class that could only be dependency injected using constructor injection. Again, note that there is nothing special about this class.
public class SimpleMovieLister {
// the SimpleMovieLister has a dependency on the MovieFinder
private MovieFinder movieFinder;
// a constructor so that the Spring container can 'inject' a MovieFinder
public SimpleMovieLister(MovieFinder movieFinder) {
this.movieFinder = movieFinder;
}
// business logic that actually 'uses' the injected MovieFinder is omitted...
}The BeanFactory supports both of these variants for injecting dependencies into beans it manages. (It in fact also supports injecting setter-based dependencies after some dependencies have already been supplied via the constructor approach.) The configuration for the dependencies comes in the form of a BeanDefinition, which is used together with PropertyEditor instances to know how to convert properties from one format to another. However, most users of Spring will not be dealing with these classes directly (i.e. programmatically), but rather with an XML definition file which will be converted internally into instances of these classes, and used to load an entire Spring IoC container instance.
Bean dependency resolution generally happens as follows:
The BeanFactory is created and initialized with a configuration which describes all the beans. (Most Spring users use a BeanFactory or ApplicationContext implementation that supports XML format configuration files.)
Each bean has dependencies expressed in the form of properties, constructor arguments, or arguments to the static-factory method when that is used instead of a normal constructor. These dependencies will be provided to the bean, when the bean is actually created.
Each property or constructor argument is either an actual definition of the value to set, or a reference to another bean in the container.
Each property or constructor argument which is a value must be able to be converted from whatever format it was specified in, to the actual type of that property or constructor argument. By default Spring can convert a value supplied in string format to all built-in types, such as int, long, String, boolean, etc.
It is important to realize that Spring validates the configuration of each bean in a container as the container is created, including the validation that properties which are bean references are actually referring to valid beans (i.e. the beans being referred to are also defined in the container. However, the bean properties themselves are not set until the bean is actually created. For that which are singleton-scoped and set to be pre-instantiated (such as singleton beans in an ApplicationContext), creation happens at the time that the container is created, but otherwise this is only when the bean is requested. When a bean actually has to be created, this will potentially cause a graph of other beans to be created, as its dependencies and its dependencies' dependencies (and so on) are created and assigned.
You can generally trust Spring to do the right thing. It will detect mis-configuration issues, such as references to non-existent beans and circular dependencies, at container load-time. It will actually set properties and resolve dependencies (i.e. create those dependencies if needed) as late as possible, which is when the bean is actually created. This means that a Spring container which has loaded correctly can later generate an exception when you request a bean if there is a problem creating that bean or one of its dependencies. This could happen if the bean throws an exception as a result of a missing or invalid property, for example. This potentially delayed visibility of some configuration issues is why ApplicationContext implementations by default pre-instantiate singleton beans. At the cost of some upfront time and memory to create these beans before they are actually needed, you find out about configuration issues when the ApplicationContext is created, not later. If you wish, you can still override this default behavior and set any of these singleton beans to lazy-initialize (i.e. not be pre-instantiated).
Finally, if it is not immediately apparent, it is worth mentioning that when one or more collaborating beans are being injected into a dependent bean, each collaborating bean is totally configured prior to being passed (via one of the DI flavors) to the dependent bean. This means that if bean A has a dependency on bean B, the Spring IoC container will totally configure bean B prior to invoking the setter method on bean A; you can read 'totally configure' to mean that the bean will be instantiated (if not a pre-instantiated singleton), all of its dependencies will be set, and the relevant lifecycle methods (such as a configured init method or the IntializingBean callback method) will all be invoked.
First, an example of using XML-based configuration metadata for setter-based DI. Find below a small part of a Spring XML configuration file specifying some bean definitions.
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"> <!-- setter injection using the nested <ref/> element --> <property name="beanOne"><ref bean="anotherExampleBean"/></property> <!-- setter injection using the neater 'ref' attribute --> <property name="beanTwo" ref="yetAnotherBean"/> <property name="integerProperty" value="1"/> </bean> <bean id="anotherExampleBean" class="examples.AnotherBean"/> <bean id="yetAnotherBean" class="examples.YetAnotherBean"/>
public class ExampleBean {
private AnotherBean beanOne;
private YetAnotherBean beanTwo;
private int i;
public void setBeanOne(AnotherBean beanOne) {
this.beanOne = beanOne;
}
public void setBeanTwo(YetAnotherBean beanTwo) {
this.beanTwo = beanTwo;
}
public void setIntegerProperty(int i) {
this.i = i;
}
}As you can see, setters have been declared to match against the properties specified in the XML file.
Now, an example of using constructor-based DI. Find below a snippet from an XML configuration that specifies constructor arguments, and the corresponding Java class.
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"> <!-- constructor injection using the nested <ref/> element --> <constructor-arg><ref bean="anotherExampleBean"/></constructor-arg> <!-- constructor injection using the neater 'ref' attribute --> <constructor-arg ref="yetAnotherBean"/> <constructor-arg type="int" value="1"/> </bean> <bean id="anotherExampleBean" class="examples.AnotherBean"/> <bean id="yetAnotherBean" class="examples.YetAnotherBean"/>
public class ExampleBean {
private AnotherBean beanOne;
private YetAnotherBean beanTwo;
private int i;
public ExampleBean(
AnotherBean anotherBean, YetAnotherBean yetAnotherBean, int i) {
this.beanOne = anotherBean;
this.beanTwo = yetAnotherBean;
this.i = i;
}
}As you can see, the constructor arguments specified in the bean definition will be used to pass in as arguments to the constructor of the ExampleBean.
Now consider a variant of this where instead of using a constructor, Spring is told to call a static factory method to return an instance of the object:
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"
factory-method="createInstance">
<constructor-arg ref="anotherExampleBean"/>
<constructor-arg ref="yetAnotherBean"/>
<constructor-arg value="1"/>
</bean>
<bean id="anotherExampleBean" class="examples.AnotherBean"/>
<bean id="yetAnotherBean" class="examples.YetAnotherBean"/>public class ExampleBean {
// a private constructor
private ExampleBean(...) {
...
}
// a static factory method; the arguments to this method can be
// considered the dependencies of the bean that is returned,
// regardless of how those arguments are actually used.
public static ExampleBean createInstance (
AnotherBean anotherBean, YetAnotherBean yetAnotherBean, int i) {
ExampleBean eb = new ExampleBean (...);
// some other operations
...
return eb;
}
}Note that arguments to the static factory method are supplied via constructor-arg elements, exactly the same as if a constructor had actually been used. Also, it is important to realize that the type of the class being returned by the factory method does not have to be of the same type as the class which contains the static factory method, although in this example it is. An instance (non-static) factory method would be used in an essentially identical fashion (aside from the use of the factory-bean attribute instead of the class attribute), so details will not be discussed here.
Constructor argument resolution matching occurs using the argument's type. If there is no potential for ambiguity in the constructor arguments of a bean definition, then the order in which the constructor arguments are defined in a bean definition is the order in which those arguments will be supplied to the appropriate constructor when it is being instantiated. Consider the following class...
package x.y;
public class Foo {
public Foo(Bar bar, Baz baz) {
// ...
}
}There is no potential for ambiguity here (assuming of course that Bar and Baz classes are not related in an inheritance hierarchy). Thus the following configuration will work just fine, and you do not need to specify the constructor argument indexes and / or types explicitly... it just plain works as you would expect it to.
<beans>
<bean name="foo" class="x.y.Foo">
<constructor-arg>
<bean class="x.y.Bar"/>
</constructor-arg>
<constructor-arg>
<bean class="x.y.Baz"/>
</constructor-arg>
</bean>
</beans>When another bean is referenced, the type is known, and matching can occur (as was the case with the preceding example). When a simple type is used, such as <value>true<value>, Spring cannot determine the type of the value, and so cannot match by type without help. Consider the following class, which is used for the following two sections:
package examples;
public class ExampleBean {
// No. of years to the calculate the Ultimate Answer
private int years;
// The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
private String ultimateAnswer;
public ExampleBean(int years, String ultimateAnswer) {
this.years = years;
this.ultimateAnswer = ultimateAnswer;
}
}The above scenario can use type matching with simple types by explicitly specifying the type of the constructor argument using the 'type' attribute. For example:
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"> <constructor-arg type="int" value="7500000"/> <constructor-arg type="java.lang.String" value="42"/> </bean>
Constructor arguments can have their index specified explicitly by use of the index attribute. For example:
<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean"> <constructor-arg index="0" value="7500000"/> <constructor-arg index="1" value="42"/> </bean>
As well as solving the ambiguity problem of multiple simple values, specifying an index also solves the problem of ambiguity where a constructor may have two arguments of the same type. Note that the index is 0 based.
![[Tip]](../images/admons/tip.png) | Tip |
|---|---|
Specifying a constructor argument index is the preferred way of performing constructor IoC. | |
As mentioned in the previous section, bean properties and constructor arguments can be defined as either references to other managed beans (collaborators), or values defined inline. Spring's XML-based configuration metadata supports a number of sub-element types within its <property/> and <constructor-arg/> elements for just this purpose.
The <value/> element specifies a property or constructor argument as a human-readable string representation. As mentioned previously, JavaBeans PropertyEditors are used to convert these string values from a String to the actual type of the property or argument.
<bean id="myDataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close">
<!-- results in a setDriverClassName(String) call -->
<property name="driverClassName">
<value>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</value>
</property>
<property name="url">
<value>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb</value>
</property>
<property name="username">
<value>root</value>
</property>
<property name="password">
<value>masterkaoli</value>
</property>
</bean>The <property/> and <constructor-arg/> elements also support the use of the 'value' attribute, which can lead to much more succinct configuration. When using the 'value' attribute, the above bean definition reads like so:
<bean id="myDataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource" destroy-method="close">
<!-- results in a setDriverClassName(String) call -->
<property name="driverClassName" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
<property name="url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb"/>
<property name="username" value="root"/>
<property name="password" value="masterkaoli"/>
</bean>The Spring team generally prefer the attribute style over the use of nested <value/> elements. If you are reading this reference manual straight through from top to bottom (wow!) then we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves here, but did you know that you can specify a java.util.Properties instance like this?
<bean id="mappings" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
<!-- typed as a java.util.Properties -->
<property name="properties">
<value>
jdbc.driver.className=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb
</value>
</property>
</bean>Can you see what is happening? The Spring container is converting the text inside the <value/> element into a java.util.Properties instance using the JavaBeans PropertEditor mechanism. This is a nice shortcut, and is one of a few places where the Spring team do favor the use of the nested <value/> element over the 'value' attribute style.
The idref element is simply an error-proof way to pass the id of another bean in the container (to a <constructor-arg/> or <property/> element).
<bean id="theTargetBean" class="..."/>
<bean id="theClientBean" class="...">
<property name="targetName">
<idref bean="theTargetBean" />
</property>
</bean>The above bean definition snippet is exactly equivalent (at runtime) to the following snippet:
<bean id="theTargetBean" class="..."/>
<bean id="client" class="...">
<property name="targetName">
<value>theTargetBean</value>
</property>
</bean>The main reason the first form is preferable to the second is that using the idref tag allows the container to validate at deployment time that the referenced, named bean actually exists. In the second variation, no validation is performed on the value that is passed to the 'targetName' property of the 'client' bean. Any typo will only be discovered (with most likely fatal results) when the 'client' bean is actually instantiated. If the 'client' bean is a prototype bean, this typo (and the resulting exception) may only be discovered long after the container is actually deployed.
Additionally, if the bean being referred to is in the same XML unit, and the bean name is the bean id, the 'local' attribute may be used, which allows the XML parser itself to validate the bean id even earlier, at XML document parse time.
<property name="targetName">
<!-- a bean with an id of 'theTargetBean' must exist,
otherwise an XML exception will be thrown -->
<idref local="theTargetBean"/>
</property>By way of an example, one common place (at least in pre-Spring 2.0 configuration) where the <idref/> element brings value is in the configuration of AOP interceptors in a ProxyFactoryBean bean definition. If you use <idref/> elements when specifying the interceptor names, there is no chance of inadvertently misspelling an interceptor id.
The ref element is the final element allowed inside a <constructor-arg/> or <property/> definition element. It is used to set the value of the specified property to be a reference to another bean managed by the container (a collaborator). As mentioned in a previous section, the referred-to bean is considered to be a dependency of the bean who's property is being set, and will be initialized on demand as needed (if it is a singleton bean it may have already been initialized by the container) before the property is set. All references are ultimately just a reference to another object, but there are 3 variations on how the id/name of the other object may be specified, which determines how scoping and validation is handled.
Specifying the target bean by using the bean attribute of the <ref/> tag is the most general form, and will allow creating a reference to any bean in the same container (whether or not in the same XML file), or parent container. The value of the 'bean' attribute may be the same as either the 'id' attribute of the target bean, or one of the values in the 'name' attribute of the target bean.
<ref bean="someBean"/>
Specifying the target bean by using the local attribute leverages the ability of the XML parser to validate XML id references within the same file. The value of the local attribute must be the same as the id attribute of the target bean. The XML parser will issue an error if no matching element is found in the same file. As such, using the local variant is the best choice (in order to know about errors are early as possible) if the target bean is in the same XML file.
<ref local="someBean"/>
Specifying the target bean by using the 'parent' attribute allows a reference to be created to a bean which is in a parent container of the current container. The value of the 'parent' attribute may be the same as either the 'id' attribute of the target bean, or one of the values in the 'name' attribute of the target bean, and the target bean must be in a parent container to the current one. The main use of this bean reference variant is when you have a hierarchy of containers and you want to wrap an existing bean in a parent container with some sort of proxy which will have the same name as the parent bean (i.e. the bean definition in the child context is overriding the parent bean).
<!-- in the parent context --> <bean id="accountService" class="com.foo.SimpleAccountService"> <!-- insert dependencies as required as here --> </bean>
<!-- in the child (descendant) context --> <bean id="accountService" <-- notice that the name of this bean is the same as the name of the 'parent' bean class="org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactoryBean"> <property name="target"> <ref parent="accountService"/> <-- notice how we refer to the parent bean </property> <!-- insert other configuration and dependencies as required as here --> </bean>
(In all honesty the usage of the 'parent' attribute is not at all common.)
A <bean/> element inside the <property/> or <constructor-arg/> elements is used to define a so-called inner bean. An inner bean definition does not need to have any id or name defined, and it is best not to even specify any id or name value because the id or name value simply will be ignored by the container.
Find below an example of an inner bean.
<bean id="outer" class="..."> <!-- instead of using a reference to a target bean, simply define the target bean inline --> <property name="target"> <bean class="com.mycompany.Person"> <!-- this is the inner bean --> <property name="name" value="Fiona Apple"/> <property name="age" value="25"/> </bean> </property> </bean>
Note that in the specific case of inner beans, the 'singleton' flag and any 'id' or 'name' attribute are effectively ignored. Inner beans are always anonymous and they are always scoped as prototypes. Please also note that it is not possible to inject inner beans into collaborating beans other than the enclosing bean.
The <list/>, <set/>, <map/>, and <props/> elements allow properties and arguments of the Java Collection type List, Set, Map, and Properties, respectively, to be defined and set.
<bean id="moreComplexObject" class="example.ComplexObject"> <!-- results in a setAdminEmails(java.util.Properties) call --> <property name="adminEmails"> <props> <prop key="administrator">administrator@somecompany.org</prop> <prop key="support">support@somecompany.org</prop> <prop key="development">development@somecompany.org</prop> </props> </property> <!-- results in a setSomeList(java.util.List) call --> <property name="someList"> <list> <value>a list element followed by a reference</value> <ref bean="myDataSource" /> </list> </property> <!-- results in a setSomeMap(java.util.Map) call --> <property name="someMap"> <map> <entry> <key> <value>yup an entry</value> </key> <value>just some string</value> </entry> <entry> <key> <value>yup a ref</value> </key> <ref bean="myDataSource" /> </entry> </map> </property> <!-- results in a setSomeSet(java.util.Set) call --> <property name="someSet"> <set> <value>just some string</value> <ref bean="myDataSource" /> </set> </property> </bean>
Note that the value of a map key or value, or a set value, can also again be any of the following elements:
bean | ref | idref | list | set | map | props | value | null
As of Spring 2.0, the container also supports the merging of collections. This allows an application developer to define a parent-style <list/>, <map/>, <set/> or <props/> element, and have child-style <list/>, <map/>, <set/> or <props/> elements inherit and override values from the parent collection; i.e. the child collection's values will be the result obtained from the merging of the elements of the parent and child collections, with the child's collection elements overriding values specified in the parent collection.
Please note that this section on merging makes use of the parent-child bean mechanism. This concept has not yet been introduced, so readers unfamiliar with the concept of parent and child bean definitions may wish to read the corresponding section before continuing (see the section entitled Section 3.6, “Bean definition inheritance”).
An example would perhaps serve best to illustrate this feature:
<beans>
<bean id="parent" abstract="true" class="example.ComplexObject">
<property name="adminEmails">
<props>
<prop key="administrator">administrator@somecompany.com</prop>
<prop key="support">support@somecompany.com</prop>
</props>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="child" parent="parent">
<property name="adminEmails">
<!-- the merge is specified on the *child* collection definition -->
<props merge="true">
<prop key="sales">sales@somecompany.com</prop>
<prop key="support">support@somecompany.co.uk</prop>
</props>
</property>
</bean>
<beans>Notice the use of the merge=true attribute on the <props/> element of the adminEmails property of the child bean definition. When the child bean is actually resolved and instantiated by the container, the resulting instance will have an adminEmails Properties collection that contains the result of the merging of the child's adminEmails collection with the parent's adminEmails collection.
administrator=administrator@somecompany.com sales=sales@somecompany.com support=support@somecompany.co.uk
Notice how the child Properties collection's value set will have inherited all the property elements from the parent <props/>. Notice also how the child's value for the support value overrides the value in the parent collection.
This merging behavior applies similarly to the <list/>, <map/>, and <set/> collection types. In the specific case of the <list/> element, the semantics associated with the List collection type, i.e. the notion of an ordered collection of values, is maintained; the parent's values will precede all of the child list's values. In the case of the Map, Set, and Properties collection types, there is no notion of ordering and hence no ordering semantics are in effect for the collection types that underlie the associated Map, Set and Properties implementation types used internally by the container.
Finally, some minor notes about the merging support are in order; you cannot merge different collection types (e.g. a Map and a List), and if you do attempt to do so an appropriate Exception will be thrown; and in case it is not immediately obvious, the 'merge' attribute must be specified on the lower level, inherited, child definition; specifying the 'merge' attribute on a parent collection definition is redundant and will not result in the desired merging; and (lastly), please note that this merging feature is only available in Spring 2.0 (and later versions).
If you are one of the lucky few to be using Java5 (Tiger), you will be aware that it is possible to have strongly typed collections. That is, it is possible to declare a Collection type such that it can only contain String elements (for example).
If you are using Spring to dependency inject a strongly-typed Collection into a bean, you can take advantage of Spring's type-conversion support such that the elements of your strongly-typed Collection instances will be converted to the appropriate type prior to being added to the Collection.
Consider the following example::
public class Foo {
private Map<String, Float> accounts;
public void setAccounts(Map<String, Float> accounts) {
this.accounts = accounts;
}
}<beans>
<bean id="foo" class="x.y.Foo">
<property name="accounts">
<map>
<entry key="one" value="9.99"/>
<entry key="two" value="2.75"/>
<entry key="six" value="3.99"/>
</map>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>When the 'accounts' property of the 'foo' bean is being prepared for injection, the generics information about the element type of the strongly-typed Map<String, Float> is actually available via reflection, and so Spring's type conversion infrastructure will actually recognize the various value elements as being of type Float and so the string values '9.99', '2.75', and '3.99' will be converted into an actual Float type.
The <null/> element is used to handle null values. Spring treats empty arguments for properties and the like as empty Strings. The following XML-based configuration metadata snippet results in the email property being set to the empty String value ("")
<bean class="ExampleBean"> <property name="email"><value></value></property> </bean>
This is equivalent to the following Java code: exampleBean.setEmail(""). The special <null> element may be used to indicate a null value. For example:
<bean class="ExampleBean"> <property name="email"><null/></property> </bean>
The above configuration is equivalent to the following Java code: exampleBean.setEmail(null).
The configuration metadata that you saw above in some places is a little verbose. That's why there are several options available for you to limit the amount of XML you have to write to configure your components a little bit. The first is a shortcut to define values and references to other beans as part of a <property/> definition. The second is slightly different format of specifying properties all together.
There exist some shortcut forms which are less verbose than using the full <value/> and <ref/> elements. The <property/>, <constructor-arg/>, and <entry/> elements all support a 'value' attribute which may be used instead of embedding a full <value/> element. Therefore, the following:
<property name="myProperty"> <value>hello</value> </property>
<constructor-arg> <value>hello</value> </constructor-arg>
<entry key="myKey"> <value>hello</value> </entry>
are equivalent to:
<property name="myProperty" value="hello"/>
<constructor-arg value="hello"/>
<entry key="myKey" value="hello"/>
In general, when typing definitions by hand, you will probably prefer to use the less verbose shortcut form (the Spring team certainly does).
The <property/> and <constructor-arg/> elements support a similar shortcut 'ref' attribute which may be used instead of a full nested <ref/> element. Therefore, the following:
<property name="myProperty"> <ref bean="myBean"> </property>
<constructor-arg> <ref bean="myBean"> </constructor-arg>
... are equivalent to:
<property name="myProperty" ref="myBean"/>
<constructor-arg ref="myBean"/>
Note however that the shortcut form is equivalent to a <ref bean="xxx"> element; there is no shortcut for <ref local="xxx">. To enforce a strict local reference, you must use the long form.
Finally, the entry element allows a shortcut form to specify the key and/or value of the map, in the form of the 'key' / 'key-ref' and 'value' / 'value-ref' attributes. Therefore, the following:
<entry>
<key>
<ref bean="myKeyBean" />
</key>
<ref bean="myValueBean" />
</entry>is equivalent to:
<entry key-ref="myKeyBean" value-ref="myValueBean"/>
Again, the shortcut form is equivalent to a <ref bean="xxx"> element; there is no shortcut for <ref local="xxx">.
The second option you have to limit the amount of XML you have to write to configure your components is to use the so-called p-namespace. As you might know, Spring 2.0 and later features support for extensible configuration formats using namespaces. Those namespaces (such as util and jee) are all based on an XML Schema definition. In fact, the beans configuration format that you've been reading about is just as much defined in an XML Schema document.
One namespace however is not defined in an XSD file and only exists in the core of Spring itself. The so-called p-namespace doesn't need a schema definition and is a powerful way of configuring your properties differently than the way you've seen so far. Instead of using nested property elements, using the p-namespace you can use attributes (in the p-namespace) as part of the bean element that describe your property values. The values of the attributes will be taken as values for your properties.
Let's review an example. The following two XML snippets are (in terms of Spring configuration declaratives) entirely the same, except for the fact that the first is using the format you're familiar with (the property elements) whereas the second example is using the p-namespace
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">
<bean name="classic" class="com.mycompany.ExampleBean">
<property name="email" value="foo@bar.com/>
</bean>
<bean name="p-namespace"
class="com.mycompany.ExampleBean"
p:email="foo@bar.com"/>
</beans>As you can see, we're including a attribute from the p-namespace called email in the bean definition. This is telling Spring that it should include a property declaration. As previously mentioned, the p-namespace doesn't have a schema definition, so the name of the attribute can be set to whatever name your property has.
The second exampe (see below) included two more bean definitions that both have a reference to another bean:
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd">
<bean name="john-classic" class="com.mycompany.Person">
<property name="name" value="John Doe"/>
<property name="spouse" ref="jane"/>
</bean>
<bean name="john-modern"
class="com.mycompany.Person"
p:name="John Doe"
p:spouse-ref="jane"/>
<bean name="jane" class="com.mycompany.Person">
<property name="name" value="Jane Doe"/>
</bean>
</beans>As you can see, this example doesn't only include a property value using the p-namespace, but also uses a special format to declare property references. Whereas the first bean definition uses <property name="spouse" ref="jane"/> to create a reference from bean john to bean jane, the second bean definition uses op:spouse-ref="jane" as an attribute to do the exact same thing. In this case spouse is the property name whereas the -ref part tells Spring this is not a value but a bean reference.
| Note |
|---|---|
Note that we recommend you to choose carefully which approach you are going to use in your project. You should also communicate this to your team members so you won't end up with XML documents using all three approaches at the same time. All this adds to the consistency of your codebase and will prevent people from not understanding the application because of different ways of configurating it. Also not that this functionality is only available as of Spring 2.0. | |
Using the p-namespace requires nothing else than simply adding it to your XML declaration as shown above.
Compound or nested property names are perfectly legal when setting bean properties, as long as all components of the path except the final property name are non-null. For example, in this bean definition:
<bean id="foo" class="foo.Bar"> <property name="fred.bob.sammy" value="123" /> </bean>
The foo bean has a fred property which has a bob property, which has a sammy property, and that final sammy property is being set to a scalar value of 123. In order for this to work, the fred property of foo, and the bob property of fred must both be non-null after the bean is constructed, or a NullPointerException will be thrown.
For most situations, the fact that a bean is a dependency of another is expressed simply by the fact that one bean is set as a property of another. This is typically accomplished with the <ref/> element in XML-based configuration metadata. In a variation of this, sometimes a bean which is aware of the container is simply given the id of its dependency (using a string value or alternately the <idref/> element, which evaluates the same as a string value). The first bean then programmatically asks the container for its dependency. In either case, the dependency is properly initialized before the dependent bean.
For the relatively infrequent situations where dependencies between beans are less direct (for example, when a static initializer in a class needs to be triggered, such as database driver registration), the 'depends-on' attribute may be used to explicitly force one or more beans to be initialized before the bean using this element is initialized. Find below an example of using the 'depends-on' attribute to express a dependency on a single bean.
<bean id="beanOne" class="ExampleBean" depends-on="manager"/> <bean id="manager" class="ManagerBean" />
If you need to express a dependency on multiple beans, you can supply a delimited list of bean names as the value of the 'depends-on' attribute, with commas, whitespace and semi-colons all valid delimiters. Find below an example of using 'depends-on' to express a dependency on a number of beans.
<bean id="beanOne" class="ExampleBean" depends-on="manager,accountDao"> <property name="manager" ref="manager" /> </bean> <bean id="manager" class="ManagerBean" /> <bean id="accountDao" class="x.y.jdbc.JdbcAccountDao" />
The default behavior for ApplicationContext implementations is to eagerly pre-instantiate all singleton beans at startup. Pre-instantiation means that an ApplicationContext implementation instance will eagerly create and configure all of it's singleton beans as part of its initialization process. This is generally a good thing, because it means that any errors in the configuration or in the surrounding environment will be discovered immediately (as opposed to possibly hours or even days down the line).
However, there are times when this behavior is not what is wanted. If you do not want a singleton bean to be pre-instantiated when using an ApplicationContext implementation, you can (on a bean-definition by bean-definition basis) selectively control this by marking a bean definition as lazy-initialized. A lazily-initialized bean indicates to the IoC container whether or not a bean instance should be created at startup or when it is first requested.
When configuring beans via XML, this lazy loading is controlled by the 'lazy-init' attribute on the <bean/> element; for example:
<bean id="lazy" class="com.foo.ExpensiveToCreateBean" lazy-init="true"> <!-- various properties here... --> </bean> <bean name="not.lazy" class="com.foo.AnotherBean"> <!-- various properties here... --> </bean>
When the above configuration is consumed by an ApplicationContext implementation, the bean named 'lazy' will not be eagerly pre-instantiated when the ApplicationContext is starting up, whereas the 'not.lazy' bean will be eagerly pre-instantiated.
One thing to understand about lazy-initialization is that even though a bean definition may be marked up as being lazy-initialized, if the lazy-initialized bean is the dependency of a singleton bean that is not lazy-initialized, when the ApplicationContext is eagerly pre-instantiating the singleton, it will (of course) have to satisfy all of the singletons dependencies, one of which will be the lazy-initialized bean! So don't be confused if the IoC container creates one of the beans that you have explicitly configured as lazy-initialized at startup; all that means is that the lazy-initialized bean probably is being injected into a non-lazy-initialized singleton bean elsewhere in your configuration.
It is also possible to control lazy-initialization at the container level by using the 'default-lazy-init' attribute on the <beans/> element; for example:
<beans default-lazy-init="true">
<!-- no beans will be eagerly pre-instantiated... -->
</beans>A Spring IoC container is able to autowire relationships between collaborating beans. This means that it is possible to automatically let Spring resolve collaborators (other beans) for your bean by inspecting the contents of the BeanFactory. The autowiring functionality has five modes. Autowiring is specified per bean and can thus be enabled for some beans, while other beans won't be autowired. Using autowiring, it is possible to reduce or eliminate the need to specify properties or constructor arguments, saving a significant amount of typing. [2] When using XML-based configuration metadata, the autowire mode for a bean definition is specified by using the autowire attribute of the <bean/> element. The following values are allowed:
Table 3.2. Autowiring modes
| Mode | Explanation |
|---|---|
| no | No autowiring at all. Bean references must be defined via a ref element. This is the default, and changing this is discouraged for larger deployments, since explicitly specifying collaborators gives greater control and clarity. To some extent, it is a form of documentation about the structure of a system. |
| byName | Autowiring by property name. This option will inspect the container and look for a bean named exactly the same as the property which needs to be autowired. For example, if you have a bean definition which is set to autowire by name, and it contains a master property (that is, it has a setMaster(..) method), Spring will look for a bean definition named master, and use it to set the property. |
| byType | Allows a property to be autowired if there is exactly one bean of the property type in the container. If there is more than one, a fatal exception is thrown, and this indicates that you may not use byType autowiring for that bean. If there are no matching beans, nothing happens; the property is not set. If this is not desirable, setting the dependency-check="objects" attribute value specifies that an error should be thrown in this case. |
| constructor | This is analogous to byType, but applies to constructor arguments. If there isn't exactly one bean of the constructor argument type in the container, a fatal error is raised. |
| autodetect | Chooses constructor or byType through introspection of the bean class. If a default constructor is found, the byType mode will be applied. |
Note that explicit dependencies in property and constructor-arg settings always override autowiring. Please also note that it is not currently possible to autowire so-called simple properties such as primitives, Strings, and Classes (and arrays of such simple properties).(This is by-design and should be considered a feature.) Autowire behavior can be combined with dependency checking, which will be performed after all autowiring has been completed.
It is important to understand the various advantages and disadvantages of autowiring. Some advantages of autowiring include:
Autowiring can significantly reduce the volume of configuration required. However, mechanisms such as the use of a bean template (discussed elsewhere in this chapter) are also valuable in this regard.
Autowiring can cause configuration to keep itself up to date as your objects evolve. For example, if you need to add an additional dependency to a class, that dependency can be satisfied automatically without the need to modify configuration. Thus there may be a strong case for autowiring during development, without ruling out the option of switching to explicit wiring when the code base becomes more stable.
Some disadvantages of autowiring:
Autowiring is more magical than explicit wiring. Although, as noted in the above table, Spring is careful to avoid guessing in case of ambiguity which might have unexpected results, the relationships between your Spring-managed objects is no longer explicitly documented.
Wiring information may not be available to tools that may generate documentation from a Spring container.
Autowiring by type will only work when there is a single bean definition of the type specified by the setter method or constructor argument. You need to use explicit wiring if there is any potential ambiguity.
There is no "wrong" or "right" answer in all cases. A degree of consistency across a project is best though; for example, if autowiring is not used in general, it might be confusing to developers to use it just to wire one or two bean definitions.
You can also (on a per bean basis) totally exclude a bean from being an autowire candidate. When configuring beans using Spring's XML format, the 'autowire-candidate' attribute of the <bean/> element can be set to 'false'; this has the effect of making the container totally exclude that specific bean definition from being available to the autowiring infrastructure.
This can be useful when you have a bean that you absolutely never ever want to have injected into other beans via autowiring. It does not mean that the excluded bean cannot itself be configured using autowiring... it can, it is rather that it itself will not be considered as a candidate for autowiring other beans.
The Spring IoC container also has the ability to try to check for the existence of unresolved dependencies of a bean deployed into the container. These are JavaBeans properties of the bean, which do not have actual values set for them in the bean definition, or alternately provided automatically by the autowiring feature.
This feature is sometimes useful when you want to ensure that all properties (or all properties of a certain type) are set on a bean. Of course, in many cases a bean class will have default values for many properties, or some properties do not apply to all usage scenarios, so this feature is of limited use. Dependency checking can also be enabled and disabled per bean, just as with the autowiring functionality. The default is to not check dependencies. Dependency checking can be handled in several different modes. When using XML-based configuration metadata, this is specified via the 'dependency-check' attribute in a bean definition, which may have the following values.
Table 3.3. Dependency checking modes
| Mode | Explanation |
|---|---|
| none | No dependency checking. Properties of the bean which have no value specified for them are simply not set. |
| simple | Dependency checking is performed for primitive types and collections (everything except collaborators, i.e. other beans) |
| object | Dependency checking is performed for collaborators only |
| all | Dependency checking is done for collaborators, primitive types and collections |
If you are using Java 5 (Tiger) and thus have access to source level annotations, you may find the section entitled Section 25.3.1, “@Required” to be of interest.
For most application scenarios, the majority of the beans in the container will be singletons. When a singleton bean needs to collaborate with (use) another singleton bean, or a non-singleton bean needs to collaborate with another non-singleton bean, the typical and common approach of handling this dependency by defining one bean to be a property of the other, is quite adequate. There is however a problem when the bean lifecycles are different. Consider a singleton bean A which needs to use a non-singleton (prototype) bean B, perhaps on each method invocation on A. The container will only create the singleton bean A once, and thus only get the opportunity to set its properties once. There is no opportunity for the container to provide bean A with a new instance of bean B every time one is needed.
One solution to this issue is to forgo some inversion of control. Bean A can be made aware of the container by implementing the BeanFactoryAware interface, and use programmatic means to ask the container via a getBean("B") call for (a typically new) bean B instance every time it needs it. Find below an admittedly somewhat contrived example of this approach:
// a class that uses a stateful Command-style class to perform some processing package fiona.apple; // lots of Spring-API imports import org.springframework.beans.BeansException; import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory; import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactoryAware; public class CommandManager implements BeanFactoryAware { private BeanFactory beanFactory; public Object process(Map commandState) { // grab a new instance of the appropriate Command Command command = createCommand(); // set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance command.setState(commandState); return command.execute(); } // the Command returned here could be an implementation that executes asynchronously, or whatever protected Command createCommand() { return (Command) this.beanFactory.getBean("command"); // notice the Spring API dependency } public void setBeanFactory(BeanFactory beanFactory) throws BeansException { this.beanFactory = beanFactory; } }
The above example is generally is not a desirable solution since the business code is then aware of and coupled to the Spring Framework. Method Injection, a somewhat advanced feature of the Spring IoC container, allows this use case to be handled in a clean fashion.
Lookup method injection refers to the ability of the container to override methods on container managed beans, to return the result of looking up another named bean in the container. The lookup will typically be of a prototype bean as in the scenario described above (although it can also be a singleton of course - but in that case injecting the instance straight into the object would suffice). The Spring Framework implements this method injection by dynamically generating a subclass overriding the method, using bytecode generation via the CGLIB library.
So if you look at the code from previous code snippet (the CommandManager class), the Spring container is going to dynamically override the implementation of the createCommand() method. Your CommandManager class is not going to have any Spring dependencies, as can be seen in this reworked example below:
package fiona.apple; // no more Spring imports! public abstract class CommandManager { public Object process(Object commandState) { // grab a new instance of the appropriate Command interface Command command = createCommand(); // set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance command.setState(commandState); return command.execute(); } // okay... but where is the implementation of this method? protected abstract Command createCommand(); }
In the client class containing the method to be injected (the CommandManager in this case), the method that is to be 'injected' must have a signature of the following form:
<public|protected> [abstract] <return-type> theMethodName(no-arguments);If the method is abstract, the dynamically-generated subclass will implement the method. Otherwise, the dynamically-generated subclass will override the concrete method defined in the original class. Let's look at an example:
<!-- a stateful bean deployed as a prototype (non-singleton) --> <bean id="command" class="fiona.apple.AsyncCommand" scope="prototype"> <!-- inject dependencies here as required --> </bean> <!-- commandProcessor uses statefulCommandHelper --> <bean id="commandManager" class="fiona.apple.CommandManager"> <lookup-method name="createCommand" bean="command"/> </bean>
The bean identified as commandManager will call its own method createCommand() whenever it needs a new instance of the command bean. It is important to note that the person deploying the beans must be careful to deploy the command bean as a prototype (if that is actually what is needed). If it is deployed as a singleton (either explicitly, or relying on the default true setting for this flag), the same instance of the command bean will be returned each time!
Note that lookup method injection can be combined with both Constructor and Setter Injection.
Please be aware that in order for this dynamic subclassing to work, you will need to have the CGLIB jar(s) on your classpath. Additionally, the class that the Spring container is going to subclass cannot be final, and the method that is being overridden cannot be final either. Also, testing a class that has an abstract method can be somewhat odd in that you will have to subclass the class yourself and supply a stub implementation of the abstract method. Finally, beans that have been the target of method injection cannot be serialized.
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The interested reader may also find the ServiceLocatorFactoryBean (in the org.springframework.beans.factory.config package) to be of use; the approach is similar to that of the ObjectFactoryCreatingFactoryBean, but it allows you to specify your own lookup interface as opposed to having to use a Spring-specific lookup interface such as the ObjectFactory. Consult the (copious) Javadocs for the ServiceLocatorFactoryBean for a full treatment of this alternative approach (that does reduce the coupling to Spring). | |