Spring boot with @RefreshScope @PostConstruct @PreDestroy

Question

In my Spring boot application, we utilize @RefreshScope for dynamic reloading of beans after configuration changes. It works, but I have encountered an issue when combining the @RefreshScope on beans with methods annotated @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy. It seems the @PostConstruct is not called after refresh.

When booting the app, the @PostConstruct method is called normally. When invoking refresh, the @PreDestroy method gets invoked normally as well, and I would expect @PostConstruct to be called on the new proxied bean instance, but it is not. There is important init/destroy-logic going on in these methods, so not having them called is a problem.

Anyone encountered the same problem, and is this a bug or a "feature"? Is there a way to make this work?

Best regards

Answer 1

I faced the same problem today and was able to solve it by calling a method on the @RefreshScope'd bean after the refresh. To accomplish this, I added an event handler for the RefreshScopeRefreshedEvent to the affected bean:

@EventListener
public void onRefreshScopeRefreshed(final RefreshScopeRefreshedEvent event) {
    getClass();
}

As you can see it's a quite meaningless implementation, but nevertheless this method call on the bean triggers its initialization (the @PostConstruct method).

This behaviour conforms to the documentation:

Refresh scope beans are lazy proxies that initialize when they are used (i.e. when a method is called),

But still I think that it's really a bug and that @PostConstruct should be called automatically after a refresh.