How you can use Method Injection in
scenarios where bean lifecycles are different i.e. you want to inject a
non-singleton bean inside a singleton bean. For those of you who are not aware
of Method Injection, it allows you to inject methods instead of objects in your
class. Method Injection is useful in scenarios where you need to inject a
smaller scope bean in a larger scope bean. For example, you have to inject a
prototype bean inside an singleton bean, on each method invocation of Singleton
bean. Just defining your bean prototype, does not create new instance each time
a singleton bean is called because container creates a singleton bean only
once, and thus only sets a prototype bean once. So, it is completely wrong to
think that if you make your bean prototype you will get new instance each time
prototype bean is called.
To make this problem more concrete, let’s
consider we have to inject a validator instance each time a RequestProcessor
bean is called. I want validator bean to be prototype because Validator has a
state like a collection of error messages which will be different for each
request.
RequestProcessor class
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@Component
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public class RequestProcessor implements Processor {
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@Autowired(required
= true)
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private Validator validator;
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public Response process(Request request)
{
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List errorMessages =
validator.validate(request);
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if (!errorMessages.isEmpty()) {
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return null;
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}
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return null;
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}
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}
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Validator class
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@Component
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@Scope(value
= "prototype")
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public class Validator {
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private List<String> errorMessages =
new ArrayList<String>();
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public Validator() {
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System.out.println("New
Instance");
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}
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public List<String>
validate(Request request) {
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errorMessages.add("Validation
Failed");
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return errorMessages;
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}
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}
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Because I am using Spring
annotations, the only thing I need specify in xml is to activate annotation
detection and classpath scanning for annotated components.
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
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<context:annotation-config />
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<context:component-scan base-package="com.shekhar.spring.scoped.proxy"></context:component-scan>
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</beans>
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Now lets write a test to see how
many instances of prototype bean gets created when we call the processor 10
times.
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@ContextConfiguration
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@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
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public class RequestProcessorTest {
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@Autowired
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private Processor processor;
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@Test
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public void testProcess() {
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for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
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Response response =
processor.process(new
Request());
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assertNull(response);
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}
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}
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}
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If you run this test, you will see
that only one instance of validator bean gets created as “New Instance” will
get printed only once. This is because container creates RequestProcessor bean
only once, and thus only sets Validator bean once and reuses that bean on each
invocation of process method.
One possible solution for this
problem is to use Method Injection. I didn’t liked method injection approach
because it imposes restriction on your class i.e. you have to make your class
abstract. In this blog, I am going to talk about the second approach for
handling such a problem. The second approach is to use Spring AOP Scoped
proxies which injects a new validator instance each time RequestProcessor bean
is called. To make it work, the only change you have to do is to specify
proxyMode in Validator class.
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@Component
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@Scope(proxyMode
= ScopedProxyMode.TARGET_CLASS, value = "prototype")
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public class Validator {
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private List<String> errorMessages =
new ArrayList<String>();
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public Validator() {
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System.out.println("New
Instance");
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}
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public List<String>
validate(Request request) {
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errorMessages.add("Validation
Failed");
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return errorMessages;
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}
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}
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There are four possible values for
proxyMode attribute. I have used TARGET_CLASS which creates a class based
proxy. This mode requires that you have CGLIB jar in your classpath. If you run
your test again you will see that 10 instances of Validator class will be
created. I found this solution cleaner as I don’t have to make my class
abstract and it makes unit testing of RequestProcessor class easier.