How to find out how a specific bean is wired in Spring

Question

I have a spring application (A) which uses a transient dependency (B) which in itself is based on Spring as well.

So to summarize, war A & jar B are both spring projects. B is a dependency of A.

One of the attributes of a class in B is decorated in the following way

@Resource(name="thisIsTheTargetRef")
private String hardToFindMe;

I went through the application context files of A & B but I do not find a declaration of a bean with the id 'thisIsTheTargetRef'. But somehow the logs show that the .hardToFindMe. attr gets wired with 'thisIsTheTargetRef' bean. I search through both the A & B projects including all other dependencies to see if this is getting picked up from somewhere else. No dice. I even inspected the Component-scan packages but with no luck. I also did a hard text search for 'thisIsTheTargetRef' in both A & B including the dependency projects. I still don't find it.

Here is a log snippet showing that the bean is still getting wired.

[#|2014-01-27T18:23:16.654+0000|INFO|glassfish3.1.2|javax.enterprise.system.std.com.sun.enterprise.server.logging|_ThreadID=10;_ThreadName=Thread-3;|77875 [main] DEBUG org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory {} null - Returning cached instance of singleton bean 'thisIsTheTargetRef'
|#]


[#|2014-01-27T18:23:46.640+0000|INFO|glassfish3.1.2|javax.enterprise.system.std.com.sun.enterprise.server.logging|_ThreadID=10;_ThreadName=Thread-3;|18:23:46,639 INFO  [XmlWebApplicationContext:1332] Bean 'thisIsTheTargetRef' of type [class org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean] is not eligible for getting processed by all BeanPostProcessors (for example: not eligible for auto-proxying)
|#]

It does appears that I'm missing something here. There might have been a dependency that I have missed looking into and my eyes are just fooling me. But any other obvious places that I should look at?

If not, based on the logs, XmlWebApplicationContext:1332 is referred as the location for the bean. How can I debug to find out where it is getting picked from? Thanks.

Answer 1

You might be lucky by defining a watch/breakpoint on the field you know where it is injected. During the debugging you should get a stop during the autowiring process and you will see which class is wired. This should help identifing it and then check occurences for this class.

I'm not sure if you can directly find out from where this bean is loaded. One hint should be either the annotationprocessor or xmlprocessor.