Spring @Autowired Annotation

Spring @Autowired annotation is used for automatic dependency injection. Spring framework is built on dependency injection and we inject the class dependencies through spring bean configuration file.

Spring @Autowired Annotation

Usually we provide bean configuration details in the spring bean configuration file and we also specify the beans that will be injected in other beans using ref attribute. But Spring framework provides autowiring features too where we don’t need to provide bean injection details explicitly.

There are different ways through which we can autowire a spring bean.

1. autowire byName – For this type of autowiring, setter method is used for dependency injection. Also the variable name should be same in the class where we will inject the dependency and in the spring bean configuration file.
2. autowire byType – For this type of autowiring, class type is used. So there should be only one bean configured for this type in the spring bean configuration file.
3. autowire by constructor – This is almost similar to autowire byType, the only difference is that constructor is used to inject the dependency.
4. autowire by autodetect – If you are on Spring 3.0 or older versions, this is one of the autowire options available. This option was used for autowire by constructor or byType, as determined by Spring container. Since we already have so many options, this option is deprecated. I will not cover this option in this tutorial.
5. @Autowired annotation – We can use Spring @Autowired annotation for spring bean autowiring. @Autowired annotation can be applied on variables and methods for autowiring byType. We can also use @Autowired annotation on constructor for constructor based spring autowiring.
   For @Autowired annotation to work, we also need to enable annotation based configuration in spring bean configuration file. This can be done by context:annotation-config element or by defining a bean of type org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.
6. @Qualifier annotation – This annotation is used to avoid conflicts in bean mapping and we need to provide the bean name that will be used for autowiring. This way we can avoid issues where multiple beans are defined for same type. This annotation usually works with the @Autowired annotation. For constructors with multiple arguments, we can use this annotation with the argument names in the method.

By default spring bean autowiring is turned off. Spring bean autowire default value is “default” that means no autowiring is to be performed. autowire value “no” also have the same behavior.

Spring @Autowired Annotation – Bean Configuration File

Spring bean configuration file is the main part of any spring application, let’s see how our spring bean configuration file looks and then we will look into each part of it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
		http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-4.0.xsd"
		default-autowire="byName" default-autowire-candidates="*" >

<bean name="employee" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.model.Employee">
	<property name="name" value="Pankaj"></property>
</bean>

<bean name="employee1" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.model.Employee" autowire-candidate="false">
	<property name="name" value="Dummy Name"></property>
</bean>

<!-- autowiring byName, bean name should be same as the property name -->
<bean name="employeeServiceByName" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.service.EmployeeService" autowire="byName" />

<!-- autowiring byType, there should be only one bean definition for the mapping -->
<bean name="employeeServiceByType" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.service.EmployeeService" autowire="byType" />

<!-- autowiring by constructor -->
<bean name="employeeServiceConstructor" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.service.EmployeeService" autowire="constructor" />

<!-- Enable Annotation based configuration -->
<context:annotation-config />

<!-- using @Autowiring annotation in below beans, byType and constructor -->
<bean name="employeeAutowiredByTypeService" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.service.EmployeeAutowiredByTypeService" />
<bean name="employeeAutowiredByConstructorService" class="com.journaldev.spring.autowiring.service.EmployeeAutowiredByConstructorService" />
</beans>

Important points about spring bean configuration file are:

• beans element default-autowire is used to define the default autowiring method. Here I am defining the default autowiring method to be byName.
• beans element default-autowire-candidates is used to provide the pattern for bean names that can be used for autowiring. For simplicity I am allowing all the bean definitions to be eligible for autowiring, however if we can define some pattern for autowiring. For example, if we want only DAO bean definitions for autowiring, we can specify it as default-autowire-candidates="*DAO".
• autowire-candidate=“false” is used in a bean definition to make it ineligible for autowiring. It’s useful when we have multiple bean definitions for a single type and we want some of them not to be autowired. For example, in above spring bean configurations “employee1” bean will not be used for autowiring.
• autowire attribute byName, byType and constructor is self understood, nothing much to explain there.
• context:annotation-config is used to enable annotation based configuration support. Notice that employeeAutowiredByTypeService and employeeAutowiredByConstructorService beans don’t have autowire attributes.

参考

Spring @Autowired Annotation