Autowire of prototype bean into prototype bean?

Question

I'm working with some existing code and it is doing things I haven't seen before. I've dealt with autowiring prototype beans into singletons using method injection or getting the bean from the context using getBean(). What I am seeing in this code I am working on is a bean that is a prototype and retrieved using getBean(), and it has autowired dependencies. Most of these are singleton beans, which makes sense. But there is an autowire of another prototype bean, and from what I see, it does seem like it is getting a new bean. My question is when you autowire a prototype into a prototype, will that give you a new instance? Since the autowire request is not at startup but rather when this bean is created, does it go and create a new instance? This goes against what I thought about autowire and prototype beans and I wanted to hear an answer from out in the wild. Thanks for any insight. I'm trying to minimize my refactoring of this code as it is a bit spaghetti-ish.

example:

@Scope("prototype")
public class MyPrototypeClass  {

    @Autowired
    private ReallyGoodSingletonService svc;

    @Autowired
    private APrototypeBean bean;

    public void doSomething() {
        bean.doAThing();
    }
}

@Scope("prototype)
public class APrototypeBean {
   private int stuffgoeshere;

   public void doAThing() {
   }
}

So when doSomething() in MyPrototypeClass is called, is that "bean" a singleton or a new one for each instance of MyPrototypeClass?

Answer 1

In your example, the APrototypeBean bean will be set to a brand new bean which will live through until the instance of MyPrototypeClass that you created is destroyed.

If you create a second instance of MyPrototypeClass then that second instance will receive its own APrototypeBean. With your current configuration, every time you call doSomething(), the method will be invoked on an instance of APrototypeBean that is unique for that MyPrototypeClass object.