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How to inject an attribute using spring in a type handler?

I'm setting up an application which uses mybatis to map objects to/from the database.
In my mybatis file, I use a typehandler to map one of the objects being sent to the database.
In the typeHandler, I am injecting an attribute using spring #resource.
However, when the typehandler is called, the injected property is always null.
From my research, I have discovered that mybatis sets its configuration before spring loads. That means the bean is cannot be injected into the handler as it is created after.
Does anyone know a solution to this?

Should let spring manage customized type handler, like this:
<bean id="sqlSessionFactory" class="org.mybatis.spring.SqlSessionFactoryBean">
<property name="typeHandlers">
<array>
<bean class="com.example.YourCustomTypeHandler">
<!-- inject -->
<property name="property" ref="bean"/>
</bean>
</array>
</property>
</bean>

Understanding spring proxying

The Spring documentation provides the following example to show us the reason why we need to define aop:scoped-proxy explicitly in beans of scope session, reques, etc.
<bean id="userPreferences" class="com.foo.UserPreferences" scope="session">
<aop:scoped-proxy/>
</bean>
<bean id="userManager" class="com.foo.UserManager">
<property name="userPreferences" ref="userPreferences"/>
</bean>
We need proxy here, because for each request to the userPreferences bean we want to delegate one to the actual session-scoped bean's instance. That's clear. But the documentation also said that this's a deafult behavior for singletone/prototype scoped beans.
Consider the following example:
<bean id="userPreferences" class="com.foo.UserPreferences" />
<bean id="userManager" class="com.foo.UserManager">
<property name="userPreferences" ref="userPreferences"/>
</bean>
Why do we need in proxy in the case of singletone-scoped beans? Doesn't injecting and calling to proxy cause some performance overhead?
Question: For performance sakes, could we avoid injecting proxy and inject actual bean instances in the case of the singletone-scoped beans instead?

Nesting abstract beans in Spring and init-method does not seem to work

I have the following construct Spring XML (Spring 3.1):
<bean id="taskRunner" abstract="true" init-method="startThreads"
class="my.class.TaskRunner" />
...
<bean id="taskRunnerA" parent="taskRunner">
<constructor-arg name="foo">...</constructor-arg>
<property name="bar">...</property>
</bean>
And I am trying to separate out the init method into a higher level abstract bean:
<bean id="taskRunnerLauncher" abstract="true" init-method="startThreads" />
<bean id="taskRunner" abstract="true" depends-on="taskRunnerLauncher"
class="my.class.TaskRunner" />
...
<bean id="taskRunnerA" parent="taskRunner">
<constructor-arg name="foo">...</constructor-arg>
<property name="bar">...</property>
</bean>
Somehow this does not work, i.e. startThreads() is never invoked in the second case. Does anybody know why? Does Spring support nested abstract beans?
My idea for doing this is so I can override "taskRunnerLauncher" in unit tests and set it to "mock" or "java.lang.Object" and suppress startThreads() call (which starts new thread and making it a pain to test).

Does anybody know why?
The taskRunnerLauncher bean is set to be abstract. This means it will only act as a template for other beans. Spring will not actually create a bean for it. Therefore there won't be any invocation of startThreads because there is nothing to invoke it on.

Found the problem. I mistakenly used depends-on instead of parent attribute on taskRunner bean.

Spring http invoker, bean scope not honored?

I am exposing a bean that is not thread safe via Spring's http invoker. What I want is that every remote call should get a new instance of the bean. I started by setting the scope to prototype for the bean that I am exposing in the Dispatcher servlet XML. But it still seemed to create only one instance. So all client threads were concurrently accessing the same bean instance.
Next I also set the scopr to prototype for HttpInvokerProxyFactoryBean in the client spring-config.xml. But even then I see a single instance of the bean being returned.
Any ideas on what I am doing wrong? Or has anyone else faced this problem.
Thanks in advance.
Here are the relevant snippets
DispatcherServlet-servlet.xml
<bean id="fuBeanImpl" class="com.fubar.FuBeanImpl" scope="prototype">
</bean>
<bean id="fuBeanService" class="org.springframework.remoting.httpinvoker.HttpInvokerServiceExporter">
<property name="service" ref="fuBeanImpl"/>
<property name="serviceInterface" value="com.fubar.FuBean"/>
</bean>
spring-config.xml
<bean id="fuBeanService" class="org.springframework.remoting.httpinvoker.HttpInvokerProxyFactoryBean" scope="prototype">
<property name="serviceUrl">
<value>http://fubar/fuBeanService</value>
</property>
<property name="serviceInterface">
<value>com.fubar.FuBean</value>
</property>
<property name="httpInvokerRequestExecutor">
<bean class="org.springframework.remoting.httpinvoker.CommonsHttpInvokerRequestExecutor"/>
</property>
</bean>

There is another current question Prototype Scope not working about an almost identical problem.
Both of these solutions should work here also:
Tight coupling to the
ApplicationContext and looking up the
Bean manually
Lookup Method Injection via
CGLib (by yours truly)

This is because your HttpInvokerServiceExporter bean is still a singleton, and it has a reference to the prototype-scoped fuBeanImpl bean. So the exporter gets a single instance of FuBeanImpl and never asks for a new one. This is the problem with singleton-scoped beans referring to on-singleton-scoped beans - the reference "collapses" the prototype, effectively.
You need to make HttpInvokerServiceExporter a prototype-scoped bean also, although this might have side-effects. For example, you haven't told us what is referring to the HttpInvokerServiceExporter - probably a url-mapping definition somewhere?
edit: Since you've clarified that you're using a SimpleUrlhandlerMapping, then what you can do is to inject that with the name of the handler bean, rather than a direct bean reference to it. This means that the handler bean (i.e. the fuBeanService bean) can be a prototype, even though the SimpleUrlhandlerMapping is a singleton.

conditional beans using spring

I am trying to write a ValidatorFactory which will give me a validator based on its type
public Validator getNewValidator(ValidatorType type){
switch:
case a : new Validator1();
break;
case b : new Validator2();
break;
}
I want to write using spring xml beans definition
I can use method injection but it will let me create only one object and the method does
not take any arguments.
I don't want to use FactoryBean.. I am just looking whether we can do this using spring xml
bean definition.

you can do conditional bean injection with plain xml. The "ref" attribute can be triggered by property values from a property file and thus create conditional beans depending on property values. This feature is not documented but it works perfect.
<bean id="validatorFactory" class="ValidatorFactory">
<property name="validator" ref="${validatorType}" />
</bean>
<bean id="validatorTypeOne" class="Validator1" lazy-init="true" />
<bean id="validatorTypeTwo" class="Validator2" lazy-init="true" />
And the content of the property file would be:
validatorType=validatorTypeOne
To use the property file in your xml just add this context to the top of your spring config
<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:app.properties" />

For complex cases (more complex than the one exposed), Spring JavaConfig could be your friend.

If you are using annotation (#Autowired, #Qualifier etc) instead of xml, you are not able to make conditional beans work (at least at current version 3). This is due to #Qualifier does not support expression
#Qualifier(value="${validatorType}")
More information is at https://stackoverflow.com/a/7813228/418439

I had an slightly different requirements. In my case I wanted to have encoded password in production but plain text in development. Also, I didn't have access to parent bean parentEncoder. This is how I managed to achieve that:
<bean id="plainTextPassword" class="org.springframework.security.authentication.encoding.PlaintextPasswordEncoder"/>
<bean id="shaPassword" class="org.springframework.security.authentication.encoding.ShaPasswordEncoder">
<constructor-arg type="int" value="256"/>
</bean>
<bean id="parentEncoder" class="org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactoryBean">
<property name="targetSource">
<bean class="org.springframework.aop.target.HotSwappableTargetSource">
<constructor-arg ref="${password.encoding}Password"/>
</bean>
</property>
</bean>
Of course, I defined password.encoding in a property file with possible values as sha or plainText.

You should be able to do this:
<bean id="myValidator" factory-bean="validatorFactory" factory-method="getNewValidator" scope="prototype">
<constructor-arg><ref bean="validatorType"/></constructor-arg>
</bean>
<bean id="validatorType" ... />
Of course, it uses an automatically configured FactoryBean underneath but you avoid any Spring dependency in your code.