How to collect and inject all beans of a given type in Spring XML configuration
- by GrzegorzOledzki
One of the strongest accents of the Spring framework is the Dependency Injection concept. I understand one of the advices behind that is to separate general high-level mechanism from low-level details (as announced by Dependency Inversion Principle).
Technically, that boils down to having a bean implementation to know as little as possible about a bean being injected as a dependency, e.g.
public class PrintOutBean {
private LogicBean logicBean;
public void action() {
System.out.println(logicBean.humanReadableDetails());
}
//...
}
<bean class="PrintOutBean">
<property name="loginBean" ref="ShoppingCartBean"/>
</bean>
But what if I wanted to a have a high-level mechanism operating on multiple dependent beans?
public class MenuManagementBean {
private Collection<Option> options;
public void printOut() {
for (Option option:options) {
// do something for option
}
//...
}
}
I know one solution would be to use @Autowired annotation in the singleton bean, that is...
@Autowired
private Collection<Option> options;
But doesn't it violate the separation principle? Why do I have to specify what dependents to take in the very same place I use them (i.e. MenuManagementBean class in my example)?
Is there a way to inject collections of beans in the XML configuration like this (without any annotation in the MMB class)?
<bean class="MenuManagementBean">
<property name="options">
<xxx:autowire by-type="MyOptionImpl"/>
</property>
</bean>
