Including bean definition when a profile is NOT active

Question

In my application I use several profiles to make certain beans eligible for autowiring. What I'm missing is the possibility to make a bean eligible for autowiring when a certain profile is NOT active.

The best way of doing it that I thought about is like this:

1. Let's suppose we have a list of all possible profiles, e.g. {A, B, C, D}.
2. Profiles active for particular execution are {A, C}.
3. What I do is I create artificial profiles for all possible profiles which are not active. In the example case I would create {not_B, not_D} profiles.
4. The beans I want to be active based on not active profile X I make active for profile not_X. In my case if I wanted a bean to be eligible for autowiring when profile B is not active, I would annotate them @Profile("not_B")

This solution however requires an up-front knowledge about all possible profiles.

Can you think of any better solution?

Answer 1

You can use a not (!) operator... but you have to use Spring 3.2 M1.

The following syntax is now supported

<beans profile="A,!B">  @Profile({"A", "!B"}) 

indicating that the element or annotated component should be processed only if profile 'A' is active or profile 'B' is not active.

See change announced here: Spring Framework 3.2 M1 Released
The commit is at GitHub: Support not (!) operator for profile selection
Issue in JIRA: SPR-8728

If upgrading to Spring 3.2 is not possible for your project, I would recommend not using the @Profile approach and ensuring that the bean is not created in your Spring configuration.