@Scope("prototype") bean scope not creating new bean

Question

Scope prototype means that every time you ask spring (getBean or dependency injection) for an instance it will create a new instance and give a reference to that.

In your example a new instance of LoginAction is created and injected into your HomeController . If you have another controller into which you inject LoginAction you will get a different instance.

If you want a different instance for each call - then you need to call getBean each time - injecting into a singleton bean will not achieve that.

Since Spring 2.5 there's a very easy (and elegant) way to achieve that.

You can just change the params proxyMode and value of the @Scope annotation.

With this trick you can avoid to write extra code or to inject the ApplicationContext every time that you need a prototype inside a singleton bean.

Example:

@Service 
@Scope(value="prototype", proxyMode=ScopedProxyMode.TARGET_CLASS)  
public class LoginAction {}

With the config above LoginAction (inside HomeController) is always a prototype even though the controller is a singleton.

Just because the bean injected into the controller is prototype-scoped doesn't mean the controller is!

@controller is a singleton object, and if inject a prototype bean to a singleton class will make the prototype bean also as singleton unless u specify using lookup-method property which actually create a new instance of prototype bean for every call you make.

As mentioned by nicholas.hauschild injecting Spring context is not a good idea. In your case, @Scope("request") is enough to fix it. But let say you need several instances of LoginAction in controller method. In this case, I would recommend to create the bean of Supplier (Spring 4 solution):

    @Bean
    public Supplier<LoginAction> loginActionSupplier(LoginAction loginAction){
        return () -> loginAction;
    }

Then inject it into controller:

@Controller
public class HomeController {
    @Autowired
    private  Supplier<LoginAction> loginActionSupplier;