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.

You can read more about the motivation for Method Injection in this blog entry.

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.

  • For this dynamic subclassing to work, the class that the Spring bean container subclasses cannot be final, and the method to be overridden cannot be final, either.

  • Unit-testing a class that has an abstract method requires you to subclass the class yourself and to supply a stub implementation of the abstract method.

  • Concrete methods are also necessary for component scanning, which requires concrete classes to pick up.

  • A further key limitation is that lookup methods do not work with factory methods and in particular not with @Bean methods in configuration classes, since, in that case, the container is not in charge of creating the instance and therefore cannot create a runtime-generated subclass on the fly.

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>

<!-- commandManager uses myCommand prototype bean -->
<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 ObjectFactory/ Provider injection point. See Scoped Beans as Dependencies.

You may also find the ServiceLocatorFactoryBean (in the org.springframework.beans.factory.config package) to be useful.

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.