In Spring framework, whenever a bean is used for only one particular property, it’s advise to declare it as an inner bean. And the inner bean is supported both in setter injection ‘property
‘ and constructor injection ‘constructor-arg
‘.
See a detail example to demonstrate the use of Spring inner bean.
package com.mkyong.common;
public class Customer
{
private Person person;
public Customer(Person person) {
this.person = person;
}
public void setPerson(Person person) {
this.person = person;
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return "Customer [person=" + person + "]";
}
}
package com.mkyong.common;
public class Person
{
private String name;
private String address;
private int age;
//getter and setter methods
@Override
public String toString() {
return "Person [address=" + address + ",
age=" + age + ", name=" + name + "]";
}
}
Often times, you may use ‘ref
‘ attribute to reference the “Person
” bean into “Customer
” bean, person
property as following :
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
<bean id="CustomerBean" class="com.mkyong.common.Customer">
<property name="person" ref="PersonBean" />
</bean>
<bean id="PersonBean" class="com.mkyong.common.Person">
<property name="name" value="mkyong" />
<property name="address" value="address1" />
<property name="age" value="28" />
</bean>
</beans>
In general, it’s fine to reference like this, but since the ‘mkyong
’ person bean is only used for Customer
bean only, it’s better to declare this ‘mkyong
’ person as an inner bean as following :
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
<bean id="CustomerBean" class="com.mkyong.common.Customer">
<property name="person">
<bean class="com.mkyong.common.Person">
<property name="name" value="mkyong" />
<property name="address" value="address1" />
<property name="age" value="28" />
</bean>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>
This inner bean also supported in constructor injection as following :
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
<bean id="CustomerBean" class="com.mkyong.common.Customer">
<constructor-arg>
<bean class="com.mkyong.common.Person">
<property name="name" value="mkyong" />
<property name="address" value="address1" />
<property name="age" value="28" />
</bean>
</constructor-arg>
</bean>
</beans>
Note
The id
or name
value in bean class is not necessary in an inner bean, it will simply ignored by the Spring container.
Run it
package com.mkyong.common;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
public class App
{
public static void main( String[] args )
{
ApplicationContext context =
new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[] {"Spring-Customer.xml"});
Customer cust = (Customer)context.getBean("CustomerBean");
System.out.println(cust);
}
}
Output
Customer [person=Person [address=address1, age=28, name=mkyong]]