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venerdì, dicembre 05, 2008

Auto injected spring beans

A colleague of mine asked me to solve a problem about using beans, configured using the spring container, in legacy code.
Basically he couldn't change the way those beans are created but he wanted to be able to inject their properties using a spring configuration file.
This is the way he wants to create an instance of the class BeanAutoInjecting.

BeanAutoInjecting bai = new BeanAutoInjecting();

The class BeanAutoInjecting has its attributes injected by spring container but we don't want to have any trace of Spring in the code that use this class.
A friend of mine, Lucio, proposed me to use the class AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor to sort out this problem.
Therefore we have to modify the constructor of the class BeanAutoInjecting in this way:

public BeanAutoInjecting()
{
ApplicationContext ctx = SpringLoader.getApplicationContext();
AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor aabpp = (AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor)ctx.getBean(
"org.springframework.context.annotation.
internalAutowiredAnnotationProcessor");
aabpp.processInjection(this);
}

The trick is to define a dummy constructor and to instruct the spring container to use it. Here the dummy constructor

public BeanAutoInjecting(int a)
{
System.out.println("I am the dummy constructor!");
}

Here the definition of the bean and the auto-wiring directive in the spring configuration file.

<!-- auto wiring directive -->
<context:component-scan base-package="spikes.springexamples"/>
---------------------------
<!-- bean definition with dummy constructor ->
<bean name="beanAutoInjecting" class="spikes.springexamples.BeanAutoInjecting">
<constructor-arg>15</constructor-arg>
</bean>

That's cool I would say, I am able to use a spring managed bean in my legacy code creating it out of the spring container!!!

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