How to find out what exactly does Spring autowire?

Question

I have a large Spring 2.x-based application with a couple of hundreds of applicationContext.xml files and several thousands beans/bean factories.

Most of these XML configurations say something like default-autowire="byName", effectively turning on the autowiring, but only a fraction of beans is actually autowired. Most of the bean properties are set explicitly.

(This is to historical reasons, I guess that's how you call it when you were not clever enough in the past.)

Now we would like to remove autowiring at all. We believe that only a small fraction of beans is actually autowired - but we do not know, what and were exactly. My question is:

How can we find out what and were exactly is autowired by Spring?

Ideally, we need to get a list of beans/properties so that we could inject these explicitly in out XML configurations. But before diving into Spring internals with a debugger, I decided to ask if someone on SF has maybe already solved a similar task.

ps. I don't have an intention to discuss whether autowiring is good or bad. We have a number of internal technical reasons to remove autowiring, that's all.

Answer 1

You can try to enable DEBUG logging in Spring. It prints a lot of information during initialisation phase. I bet auto-wiring messages are also printed out. You just need to find that message and then parse the log file after application is fully initialised.

UPDATE: I believe AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory is responsible for auto-wiring logic. You can check autowireByName method. It produces the following log message which you can search for in the log file:

logger.debug("Added autowiring by name from bean name '" + beanName +
    "' via property '" + propertyName + "' to bean named '" + propertyName + "'"); 

Answer 2

My guess would be to enable a logger (log4j) for that package (the one which does autowire) in a specific file.

That would output the name of all of the beans.