Spring: how to ignore @Autowired property if bean is not defined

Question

Situation: I have I class with property annotated with @Autowired:

public class MyClass {
    @Autowired
    protected MyAutoWiredBean myAutowiredBean;
}

Is there any possibility to made wiring this bean optional, i.e. if such bean is defined in some configuration file - to wire it, but if such bean is not defined - just continue working without throwing:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: 
Could not autowire field: protected MyAutoWiredBean...; 
nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException:      
No matching bean of type [com.mypackage.MyAutoWiredBean] found for dependency: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. 

Answer 1

Have you tried:

@Autowired(required=false)

Javadoc:

Declares whether the annotated dependency is required. Defaults to true