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Method Injection
In most application scenarios, most beans in the container are singletons. When a singleton bean needs to collaborate with another singleton bean or a non-singleton bean needs to collaborate with another non-singleton bean, you typically handle the dependency by defining one bean as a property of the other. A problem arises when the bean lifecycles are different. Suppose singleton bean A needs to use non-singleton (prototype) bean B, perhaps on each method invocation on A. The container creates the singleton bean A only once, and thus only gets one opportunity to set the properties. The container cannot provide bean A with a new instance of bean B every time one is needed.
A solution is to forego some inversion of control. You can make bean A aware of the container
by implementing the ApplicationContextAware
interface,
and by making a getBean("B")
call to the container ask for (a
typically new) bean B instance every time bean A needs it. The following example
shows this approach:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
package fiona.apple;
// Spring-API imports
import org.springframework.beans.BeansException;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextAware;
/**
* A class that uses a stateful Command-style class to perform
* some processing.
*/
public class CommandManager implements ApplicationContextAware {
private ApplicationContext applicationContext;
public Object process(Map commandState) {
// grab a new instance of the appropriate Command
Command command = createCommand();
// set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance
command.setState(commandState);
return command.execute();
}
protected Command createCommand() {
// notice the Spring API dependency!
return this.applicationContext.getBean("command", Command.class);
}
public void setApplicationContext(
ApplicationContext applicationContext) throws BeansException {
this.applicationContext = applicationContext;
}
}
package fiona.apple
// Spring-API imports
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextAware
// A class that uses a stateful Command-style class to perform
// some processing.
class CommandManager : ApplicationContextAware {
private lateinit var applicationContext: ApplicationContext
fun process(commandState: Map<*, *>): Any {
// grab a new instance of the appropriate Command
val command = createCommand()
// set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance
command.state = commandState
return command.execute()
}
// notice the Spring API dependency!
protected fun createCommand() =
applicationContext.getBean("command", Command::class.java)
override fun setApplicationContext(applicationContext: ApplicationContext) {
this.applicationContext = applicationContext
}
}
The preceding is not desirable, because the business code is aware of and coupled to the Spring Framework. Method Injection, a somewhat advanced feature of the Spring IoC container, lets you handle this use case cleanly.
Lookup Method Injection
Lookup method injection is the ability of the container to override methods on container-managed beans and return the lookup result for another named bean in the container. The lookup typically involves a prototype bean, as in the scenario described in the preceding section. The Spring Framework implements this method injection by using bytecode generation from the CGLIB library to dynamically generate a subclass that overrides the method.
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In the case of the CommandManager
class in the previous code snippet, the
Spring container dynamically overrides the implementation of the createCommand()
method. The CommandManager
class does not have any Spring dependencies, as
the reworked example shows:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
package fiona.apple;
// no more Spring imports!
public abstract class CommandManager {
public Object process(Object commandState) {
// grab a new instance of the appropriate Command interface
Command command = createCommand();
// set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance
command.setState(commandState);
return command.execute();
}
// okay... but where is the implementation of this method?
protected abstract Command createCommand();
}
package fiona.apple
// no more Spring imports!
abstract class CommandManager {
fun process(commandState: Any): Any {
// grab a new instance of the appropriate Command interface
val command = createCommand()
// set the state on the (hopefully brand new) Command instance
command.state = commandState
return command.execute()
}
// okay... but where is the implementation of this method?
protected abstract fun createCommand(): Command
}
In the client class that contains the method to be injected (the CommandManager
in this
case), the method to be injected requires a signature of the following form:
<public|protected> [abstract] <return-type> theMethodName(no-arguments);
If the method is abstract
, the dynamically-generated subclass implements the method.
Otherwise, the dynamically-generated subclass overrides the concrete method defined in
the original class. Consider the following example:
<!-- a stateful bean deployed as a prototype (non-singleton) -->
<bean id="myCommand" class="fiona.apple.AsyncCommand" scope="prototype">
<!-- inject dependencies here as required -->
</bean>
<!-- commandProcessor uses statefulCommandHelper -->
<bean id="commandManager" class="fiona.apple.CommandManager">
<lookup-method name="createCommand" bean="myCommand"/>
</bean>
The bean identified as commandManager
calls its own createCommand()
method
whenever it needs a new instance of the myCommand
bean. You must be careful to deploy
the myCommand
bean as a prototype if that is actually what is needed. If it is
a singleton, the same instance of the myCommand
bean is returned each time.
Alternatively, within the annotation-based component model, you can declare a lookup
method through the @Lookup
annotation, as the following example shows:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
public abstract class CommandManager {
public Object process(Object commandState) {
Command command = createCommand();
command.setState(commandState);
return command.execute();
}
@Lookup("myCommand")
protected abstract Command createCommand();
}
abstract class CommandManager {
fun process(commandState: Any): Any {
val command = createCommand()
command.state = commandState
return command.execute()
}
@Lookup("myCommand")
protected abstract fun createCommand(): Command
}
Or, more idiomatically, you can rely on the target bean getting resolved against the declared return type of the lookup method:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
public abstract class CommandManager {
public Object process(Object commandState) {
Command command = createCommand();
command.setState(commandState);
return command.execute();
}
@Lookup
protected abstract Command createCommand();
}
abstract class CommandManager {
fun process(commandState: Any): Any {
val command = createCommand()
command.state = commandState
return command.execute()
}
@Lookup
protected abstract fun createCommand(): Command
}
Note that you should typically declare such annotated lookup methods with a concrete stub implementation, in order for them to be compatible with Spring’s component scanning rules where abstract classes get ignored by default. This limitation does not apply to explicitly registered or explicitly imported bean classes.
Another way of accessing differently scoped target beans is an You may also find the |
Arbitrary Method Replacement
A less useful form of method injection than lookup method injection is the ability to replace arbitrary methods in a managed bean with another method implementation. You can safely skip the rest of this section until you actually need this functionality.
With XML-based configuration metadata, you can use the replaced-method
element to
replace an existing method implementation with another, for a deployed bean. Consider
the following class, which has a method called computeValue
that we want to override:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
public class MyValueCalculator {
public String computeValue(String input) {
// some real code...
}
// some other methods...
}
class MyValueCalculator {
fun computeValue(input: String): String {
// some real code...
}
// some other methods...
}
A class that implements the org.springframework.beans.factory.support.MethodReplacer
interface provides the new method definition, as the following example shows:
-
Java
-
Kotlin
/**
* meant to be used to override the existing computeValue(String)
* implementation in MyValueCalculator
*/
public class ReplacementComputeValue implements MethodReplacer {
public Object reimplement(Object o, Method m, Object[] args) throws Throwable {
// get the input value, work with it, and return a computed result
String input = (String) args[0];
...
return ...;
}
}
/**
* meant to be used to override the existing computeValue(String)
* implementation in MyValueCalculator
*/
class ReplacementComputeValue : MethodReplacer {
override fun reimplement(obj: Any, method: Method, args: Array<out Any>): Any {
// get the input value, work with it, and return a computed result
val input = args[0] as String;
...
return ...;
}
}
The bean definition to deploy the original class and specify the method override would resemble the following example:
<bean id="myValueCalculator" class="x.y.z.MyValueCalculator">
<!-- arbitrary method replacement -->
<replaced-method name="computeValue" replacer="replacementComputeValue">
<arg-type>String</arg-type>
</replaced-method>
</bean>
<bean id="replacementComputeValue" class="a.b.c.ReplacementComputeValue"/>
You can use one or more <arg-type/>
elements within the <replaced-method/>
element to indicate the method signature of the method being overridden. The signature
for the arguments is necessary only if the method is overloaded and multiple variants
exist within the class. For convenience, the type string for an argument may be a
substring of the fully qualified type name. For example, the following all match
java.lang.String
:
java.lang.String
String
Str
Because the number of arguments is often enough to distinguish between each possible choice, this shortcut can save a lot of typing, by letting you type only the shortest string that matches an argument type.