Good practices on finding circular dependencies between spring beans

Question

I have this exception:

SEVERE: Context initialization failedorg.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCurrentlyInCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'myService': Bean with name 'myService' has been injected into other beans [otherService] in its raw version as part of a circular reference, but has eventually been wrapped. This means that said other beans do not use the final version of the bean. This is often the result of over-eager type matching - consider using 'getBeanNamesOfType' with the 'allowEagerInit' flag turned off, for example.

Can anyone suggest good strategies for finding where the circular dependency comes from ?

I am currently looking through the context definition, but as you might imagine in a project of some maturity this takes quite a while.

So I'm generally looking for ideas on quickly finding circular bean dependencies.

Answer 1

Here's 2 tools that advertise dependency graph generation. I don't have any experience with them however.

• SpringSource's build of Eclipse - It advertises a "Spring Bean Dependency Graph"
• MyEclipse for Spring - says "bean dependency graphs"

Answer 2

One approach that worked for me was to write a helper class with a main method that instantiates a refreshable application context, disallows circular dependencies and calls refresh. Make sure that your beans / app context config files are on the classpath.

public class ContextChecker {
    public static void main( String[] args ) {
        AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext ctx = 
            new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext( "classpath*:/beans.xml" );
        ctx.setAllowCircularReferences( false );
        ctx.refresh();
    }
}

This class can be run as a Java application, e.g. from inside your IDE. If circular dependencies are detected in your context, the error messages will provide information about the offending beans.