How to override a Spring @Autowire annotation and set a field to null?

Question

I am a Spring neophyte who is working on a large Spring-based project that has extensive coupling between Spring beans. I am trying to write some integration tests that exercise subsets of the total application functionality. To do so, I'd like to override some of the autowiring. For example, suppose I have a class

public class MyDataServiceImpl implements MyDataService {
    @Qualifier("notNeededForMyDataServiceTest")
    @Autowired
    private NotNeededForMyDataServiceTest notNeededForMyDataServiceTest;
    //...
}

and a context file with:

<bean id="myDataService"
      class="MyDataServiceImpl">
</bean>

In my test, I have no need to use the notNeededForMyDataServiceTest field. Is there some way I can override the @Autowired annotation and set notNeededForMyDataServiceTest to null, perhaps in the XML file? I don't want to modify any of the Java classes, but I do want to avoid the (problematic) configuration of notNeededForMyDataServiceTest.

I tried doing:

<bean id="myDataService"
      class="MyDataServiceImpl">
    <property name="notNeededForMyDataServiceTest"><null/></property>
</bean>

That doesn't work. IntelliJ informs me "Cannot resolve property 'notNeededForMyDataServiceTest'", apparently because there are no getters and setters for that field.

I'm using Spring Framework 3.1.3.

Answer 1

The following configuration should work, I took the liberty of mixing in Java configuration

@Configuration
//This will load your beans from whichever xml file you are using
@ImportResource("classpath:/path/beans.xml")
public class TestConfigLoader{
    // This will declare the unused bean and inject MyDataServiceImpl with null.
    public @Bean(name="notNeededForMyDataServiceTest") NotNeededForMyDataServiceTest getNotNeededForMyDataServiceTest(){
        return null;
    }
... any other configuration beans if required.
}

And annotate your test class like so:

// In your test class applicationContext will be loaded from TestConfigLoader
@ContextConfiguration(classes = {TestConfigLoader.class})
public class MyTest {
    // class body...
}

Answer 2

These could help:

• Context configuration with annotated classes
• Testing with @Configuration Classes and Profiles
• Spring TestContext Framework

and profiles:

• beans profile="..."
• Introducing @Profile

You could create different beans definition in the XML configuration and then activate them using the -Dspring.profiles.active="profile1,profile2" env.