How do I force a spring container not to return a singleton instance of a bean?

Question

When I call getBean(name) on a BeanFactory, I get back an instance of the bean defined in the application context. However, when I call getBean(name) again (with the same name,) I get the same instance of the bean back. I understand how this would be desirable in some (many?) cases, but how do I tell the BeanFactory to give me a new instance?

Example Spring configuration (tersely...I've left out some verbosity, but this should get the point across):

<beans>
   <bean id="beanA" class="misc.BeanClass"/>
</beans>

Example Java:

for(int i = 0;i++;i<=1) {
    ApplicationContext context = ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("context.xml");
    Object o = context.getBean("beanA");

    System.out.println(o.toString());  // Note: misc.BeanA does not implement 
                                       // toString(), so this will display the OOID
                                       // so that we can tell if it's the same
                                       // instance
}

When I run this, I get something like:

misc.BeanClass@139894
misc.BeanClass@139894

Note that both have the same OOID...so these are the same instances...but I wanted different instances.

Answer 1

You need to tell spring that you want a prototype bean rather than a singleton bean

<bean id="beanA" class="misc.BeanClass" scope="prototype"/>

This will get you a new instance with each request.

Answer 2

The default scope is singleton, but you can set it to prototype, request, session, or global session.