Creating a collection of beans in Spring using @Configuration

Question

How can I create a collection of beans that will be properly managed by Spring using a class with a @Configuration annotation.

I would like to do something like this:

@Configuration public Config {     @Autowired     private SomeConfiguration config;      @Bean     public List<MyBean> myBeans() {         List<MyBean> beans = new ArrayList<MyBean>();         for (Device device : config.getDevices()) {             beans.add(new MyBean(device));         }         return beans;     } } 

But the MyBean instances aren't post processed. So their @Autowired methods are not called, the beans are not registered as mbeans and etc. The list is however accessible so that I can autowire a List of MyBean objects.

I cannot use something like:

@Configuration public Config {     @Autowired     private SomeConfiguration config;      @Bean     public MyBean myBean1() { ... }      @Bean     public MyBean myBean2() { ... } } 

Since the number of MyBean instances are not known before runtime. The reason I want to do this is because we are controlling a physical machine that have a variable amount of components. And I want to have one bean per component.

I'm currently achieving our goal by using a BeanFactoryPostProcessor like this:

@Component public class MyBeansFactoryPostProcessor implements BeanFactoryPostProcessor {     @Autowired     private SomeConfiguration config;      @Override     public void postProcessBeanFactory(ConfigurableListableBeanFactory beanFactory) throws BeanException {         for (Device device : config.getDevices()) {             createAndRegister(BeanDefinitionRegistry) beanFactory, device);         }     }      private void createAndRegister(BeanDefinitionRegistry registry, Device device) {         register.registerBeanDefinition("device" + device.getId(), BeanDefinitionBuilder.genericBeanDefinition(MyBean.class).addConstructorArgValue(device).getBeanDefinition());     } } 

But this just feels like a really ugly hack.

Answer 1

In order to inject your MyBean list try @Resource instead of @Autowired. for e.g.

@Resource public List<MyBean> myBeans