How to get Spring profile name from annotation?

Question

With Spring 3.1 and profiles, creating a custom interface to define specific profiles becomes interesting. Part of the beauty is the ability to completely forgot the String name of the profile and just use the annotation.

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Profile("Dev")
public @interface Dev {

}

And then simply annotate beans with @Dev. This works great.

However, how can I check if the @Dev profile is active? Environment.acceptsProfiles() requires a String argument. Is there a "neat" way of doing this, or is my only option to do something like:

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Profile(Dev.NAME)
public @interface Dev {
    public static String NAME = "Dev";
}


public class MyClass{

    @Autowired
    private Environment env;

    private void myMethod(){
       if( env.acceptsProfiles( Dev.NAME ) )
          // do something here
        ;
    }

Although functional, I'm not particularly fond of this concept. Is there another way I can do this neater?

Answer 1

I wanted to do something similar (in my case, represent a list of synonyms under one profile annotation) but I ran into the problem your having, as well as another limitation: You won't be able to apply more than one of the annotations to a single bean and have them both get picked up by spring (at least in spring 3).

Unfortunately, as you cannot pass the enum in, the solution I settled on was to just use plain-old string constants without the enum. Then I could do something like @Profile(CONSTANT_ONE, CONSTANT_TWO). I still benefited from not being able to make typos, but also gained the ability to still apply multiple profiles to the same bean.

Not perfect, but not too bad.