@autowired on method in Spring

Question

I am learning Spring, and as far as I understand, when we use @annotation on a method which has a generic name (not a setter method), then the method's arguments are autowired.

public class MovieRecommender {

    private MovieCatalog movieCatalog;

    private CustomerPreferenceDao customerPreferenceDao;

    @Autowired
    public void prepare(MovieCatalog mC,
            CustomerPreferenceDao cPD) {
        this.movieCatalog = mC;
        this.customerPreferenceDao = cPD;
    }

    // ...

}

So, here, the fields movieCatalog and customerPreferenceDao are autowired with the values of mC and cPD. What I fail to understand is how is this different from the same method without the "@autowired".

I understand @autowired when applied to a Field name, but not able to understand when the values are explicitly being passed to the method (either a setter or any other method), then what does Spring do special?

Answer 1

quite late answer, but here it is:

any method annotated with @Autowired is a config method. It is called on bean instantiation after field injection is done. The arguments of the method are injected into the method on calling.