I'm writing a service registry class. This service registry will scan packages for annotated classes and then populate some internal map. What I need then, is to be able to query for services (by String name) using some method (let's say Object get(String name)). This method will then search internal map for a service with such name and returns instance.
What I'm doing right now, is having this ServiceRegistryBean implement ApplicationContextAware and BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor and a list of Strings (package names) given on construct.
Then, as soon as the bean is constructed, registry post processor kicks in (see note) and the registry class adds the service classes as new beans (singleton, lazy loaded) to the spring bean registry. Then, getting the service instance is as simple as requesting a bean from context, returning singleton instance.
My question is: is there a better way in Spring to do this? I've looked into bean factories, but it does not seem to me the same. Support for auto-wiring and DI in service instances is essential, that's why I want Spring to instantiate it. Also, I like the idea of Spring taking care of singletons.
Note: I've found out, that when I inline the bean creation in <constructor-arg> (that is, bean is not named and is just an instance passed as constructor argument of other bean - in my case, I'm passing registry as a parameter to other constructor), BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor interface methods (namely public void postProcessBeanDefinitionRegistry(BeanDefinitionRegistry registry)) is not called at all! I'm quite sure, it is some behavior of Spring I don't know about, but I was not able to find proper documentation for the post-processor.
Thank you for any hints or insights!
Scanning for custom annotations it's already supported, you only need to add a include-filter to <context:component-scan> tag, ie
<context:component-scan base-package="org.example">
<context:include-filter type="annotation" expression="some.Annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
see http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/beans.html#beans-scanning-filters
If you turn on default-lazy-init I suppose that the DI Container is ready to use as Service Locator Registry.
About the note, only root bean definitions are taken into account when looking for BeanFactoryPostProcessors, inner beans are ignored.
Usually, scanning and registering beans is done by BeanDefinitionParsers instead because you known when the beans are registered and beans are visible for tools, like STS Spring Bean Explorer, but using a BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor is correct. The interface ensures that beans are defined before other BeanFactoryPostProcessors run.
Related
I'm learning spring and I'm stuck with the bean lifecycle !
When creating a bean, spring gives us several maners to interact with it. We can use one or all of :
BeanFactoryPostProcessor
BeanPostProcessor#postProcessBeforeInitialization
#PostConstruct
InitializingBean#afterPropertiesSet
#Bean#initMethod
BeanPostProcessor#postProcessAfterInitialization
Spring calls them in the order above
My question is : why all these points of interaction ? and when to use each of them (the use case) ?
A BeanFactoryPostProcessor and a BeanPostProcessor are quite different beast and also apply to different things.
A BeanFactoryPostProcessor will operate on the metadata for a bean (I like to call it the recipe) and will post process that. A well know example is the PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer which will inject/replace all #Value in configuration with the value. A BeanFactoryPostProcessor operates on the metadata and thus before any bean has been created.
The BeanPostProcessor can be applied to a bean and can even replace a bean. Spring AOP uses this quite a lot. An example is the PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor, when a bean has been created it will pass through this BeanPostProcessor and when it is annotated with #Persistence the bean will be replaced by a proxy. This proxy adds exception translation (i.e. it will convert JpaException and SQLException to the Spring DataAccessException). This is done in a BeanPostProcessor. And can be be done before the init-callbacks are called (the postProcessBeforeInitializationor after they have been called thepostProcessAfterInitialization). The PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessorwill run in thepostProcessAfterInitialization` as it needs to be certain the bean has been initialized.
The ServletContextAwareProcessor will run right after the object has been created to inject the ServletContext as early as possible as the initializing of a bean might depend on it.
The 3 callbacks for initializing a bean are more or less the same but are called in sequence because they have been included in later versions. It starter with only an interface InitializingBean and init-method in xml (later also added to #Bean and the annotation support was added when annotations became a thing.
You need init methods to initialize a bean, you might want to check if all properties have been set (like a required datasource) or you might want to start something. A DataSource (especially a connection pool) is a good example to initialize. After all dependencies have been injected you want to start the pool so it will open the connections. Now as you probably cannot modify the code you want to use the init-method if you control the code you probably want to add #PostConstruct. If you are writing an framework that depends on Spring I would use the InitializingBean.
Next to those 3 init methods you also have the destruction counter-parts. The DisposableBean interface (and destroy-method) and the #PreDestroy annotation. Again when you stop your application you also want to close the connections in your connection pool and you want to probably call the close method on the DataSource. A perfect sample of a destruction callback.
I have a bean defined in a appContext named MyBean in MyProject1.
I have in other app that injects all the bean definitions of MyProject1 (including MyBean).
Now I need to override that bean but there is no easy way , so in MyProject2 I make
<bean primary="true" class=MyBean />
It works great, my question is....
What will happen with all others that were using MyBean? Will now use the new bean with the primary=true or how can I specify which should use this new bean and which should keep using the old one?
Following spring documentation primary bean is used only if there are some candidates to be injected. All created beans are in the context.
If you need only your primary bean to be injected, you can use:
#Autowired
private MyBean myBean;
So all your old beans will be replaced with primary one.
If you need to handle all MyBean beans (for example you do Chain Of Responsibilities) you can inject:
#Autowired
private List<MyBean> myBeans;
and injected object would contain all your bean instances (primary and nonprimary). As Usual primary bean can be accessed from list by 0 index: myBeans.get(0). All alternative markers (for example filter by vendorType...) to detect bean that you needs you should specify and handle in you code filtering collection, but in usual way if project architecture doesn't have issues you have no needs make alternative markers filtering bean objects in collection.
Do not forget about singleton if you need only one bean in your context.
If you have specified different bean unique names you can inject with #Qualifier (sometimes using #Resource from java API javax.annotation.Resource) specifying correspond name as parameter to detect bean by name.
Spring provides ability to inject properties using SpEL. May be they'll provide new functionality to inject beans using SpEL also (it could help you in your issue in best way).
Use profiles or #Conditional. #Qualifier is meant for resolving conflict for autowire, not for deactivating all but one. When using #Qualifier, all the candidate beans are still active.
Using profiles, when you want to use the bean from project2, simply start the app with a profile=project2; the link above describes multiple ways to do that.
See my answer here for a complete example of using #Conditional.
Is it possible to define a prototype bean, using XML config or annotation-based config such that I can get an instance of the bean with a custom parameter value? My use case is a message queue handler that makes API calls with different parameter values that are supplied in the inbound message.
In this case it seems I can do one of two things:
Get an instance of my prototype-scope bean and then call setters to customize it to be specific to the inbound message.
Construct a new instance of the bean class using a plain new MyPrototypeBean() and then call setters to customize the instance.
Perhaps a different way of wording my question is: What is the benefit of using a prototype-scope bean vs. using a simple Java constructor?
To get a prototype bean from another bean while passing arguments to constructor you can use <lookup-method> (XML Configuration) or #Lookup (annotation-based configuration).
If you want to get the prototype instance from "unmanaged" code (not from a bean) or you don't want to use the lookup methods, you can achieve the same using org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory.getBean(String beanName, Object...).
Answering your second question, difference between a prototype-scope bean and using a simple Java constructor is that the prototype-scope bean still have access to Spring container's features. This includes, but it's not limited to the following: it can have collaborators provided in XML configuration (<property name="someCollaborator" ref="..."/>) or with annotations (#Resource, #Autowired, ...), t can implement Spring-aware interfaces (like ApplicationContextAware so that the prototype bean itself has access to the container).
I'm trying to get a better understanding of the #Autowired annotations component scanning, but all the examples I found so far use context.getBean(..) at some point to get at least one Bean to start with.
I also read that doing that is considered bad practice , but I can't seem to find any information on how to do it without context.getBean(..)
Could somebody please enlighten me with an example and information on how to do this ?
Define your bean in xml and use
<context:component-scan base-package="com" />
<mvc:annotation-driven />
Bean def
<bean id="processEngine" class="com.processEngine">
<property name="processEngineConfiguration" ref="processEngineConfiguration" />
</bean>
now you can get bean as following
#Autowired
private ProcessEngine processEngine;
how it works
spring scans the bean's recipes either from xml or java configuration. then spring creates a beanDefinitions which are 'loaded' into BeanFactory. BeanFactory triggers a set of BeanPostProcessors (BPP) which are scanning classes for particular annotations like Autowired/Resource/PostProcessor and etc. and do appropriate actions. in case when your class contains #Autowired annotation, AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor would auto wire required field (dependencies), and when creation of an object is done and all BPP worked out, object is ready to be used by the app, from this point your code can get 'ready' objects from container.
there are some cases when you would need to access this beans from the code which is out of spring's control and not managed by container. in order to do so, you would need to get the ApplicationContext (container) and call #getBean specifying either name or type. using applicationContext directly is not a good practice because there are some problems that you can come to, f.ex. id of a bean might be changed and if you refer to bean by id then NPE would be thrown.
configuration
there are several approaches to configure spring to scan the classes for finding bean recipes. one would be defining component-scan, in this case classes which are located in the path that you've set and having any of valid spring annotations like #Component, #Service, #Repository, #Controller (for web container) would be considered. another way would be specifying each bean separately using <bean> or #Bean.
examples.
if you want to create a web app then you should see DispatcherServlet with ContextLoaderListener classes. this classes would boot your app and load everything according to configuration. f.ex. here,
but if you want to create a desktop app, then you would end up with something like this
From time to time (usually when not using Spring Boot), I use something along the lines of the following code:
public static <T> T autowire(ApplicationContext ctx, T bean) {
ctx.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().autowireBean(bean);
return bean;
}
In my main, I create an instance of the main application class that contains a few #Autowired annotations for the main services / entry points to my Spring application.
I have some classes, with a custom annotation, that shouldn't be instantiated (abstract class, and it's just a subcomponents for a real beans). But on top of this classes, on runtime, on context initialization phase, I want to put extra beans into application context.
So, basically I need to scan classpath, process results, and introduce new beans into curent application context.
It seems that spring-mvc, spring-tasks and spring-integration are doing this (I tried to learn it from sources - no luck)
I found that I can create my own BeanFactoryPostProcessor, scan classpath and call registerSingleton for my custom bean. But I'm not sure that it's a good way for introducing new beans (seems that it's used only for postprocess of exising beans only). And I believe there are some Spring internal tools that I may reuse to simplify process.
What is a conventional way to introduce extra beans on Spring context initialization?
Your observation is actually correct, BeanFactoryPostProcessor is one of the two ways Spring provides a mechanism to modify the bean definition/instances before making them available to the application(the other is using BeanPostProcessors)
You can absolutely use BeanFactoryPostProcessors to add/modify bean definitions, here is one sample from Spring Integration codebase that adds a errorChannel if not explicitly specified by a user, you can probably use a similar code for registering your new beans:
RootBeanDefinition errorChannelDef = new RootBeanDefinition();
errorChannelDef.setBeanClassName(IntegrationNamespaceUtils.BASE_PACKAGE
+ ".channel.PublishSubscribeChannel");
BeanDefinitionHolder errorChannelHolder = new BeanDefinitionHolder(errorChannelDef,
IntegrationContextUtils.ERROR_CHANNEL_BEAN_NAME);
BeanDefinitionReaderUtils.registerBeanDefinition(errorChannelHolder, registry);
There are at least two ways to include custom annotated classes as bean definitions:
Annotate the custom annotation with #Component
Add a include filter with type annotation to <context:component-scan/>
for example:
<context:component-scan base-package="org.example">
<context:include-filter type="annotation" expression="org.example.Annotation"/>
</context:component-scan>
Then you can use a BeanPostProcessor to instantiate them, for example:
public class CustomAnnotationBeanPostProcessor extends InstantiationAwareBeanPostProcessorAdapter
#Override
public Object postProcessBeforeInstantiation(Class<?> beanClass, String beanName) throws BeansException {
if (beanClass.isAnnotationPresent(org.example.Annotation.class)) {
Object bean = createBeanInstance();
...
return bean:
}
return null;
}
}
Or use a BeanFactoryPostProcessor to process the ScannedGenericBeanDefinitions.
See AnnotationConfigUtils.registerAnnotationConfigProcessors() for sample code of internal Spring annotation postprocessors.