Grails 2.3 strange plug-in eager loading behavior

Question

I've just added a custom local plug-in (via 'grails.plugin.location...' build config declaration) to a grails 2.3 project. As soon as I add the plug-in and try to run my application I see a strange behavior whereby all of the beans in my main application suddenly try to eagerload across the board. Ie if I have:

class FooService {
  BarService barService
}

class BarService {
  FooService fooService
}

Then the application cannot start. There is no code being executed in FooService or BarService at init time that should cause the Spring context to need to unwrap the either fooService or barService instance but that behavior seems to be happening anyway. In the end the application init fails with an exception like:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCurrentlyInCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'fooService': org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBeanNotInitializedException: FactoryBean is not fully initialized yet

As the fooService requires the barService, which requires the fooService which is still being created.

As soon as I remove the dependency on the custom plug-in then the problem stops. Obviously something either in the plugin or about the plugin (meta data or something) is causing this behavior but I can't figure out what exactly.

Rather than a solution I think what I am looking for here is some trouble-shooting techniques or information leading me to understand why this eagerloading behavior is occurring. I just don't know what the right hooks/configs are that will let me get in the head of the Spring context initialization mechanism.

Answer 1

I found the answer to my question buried deep in the comments of this other SO question: Grails service using a method from another service

Basically my plugin introduced the hibernate plug-in into my project and therefore also introduced transactional-by-default services. This transactional bootstrapping was causing the eager load of all dependencies and thus my circular dependency problem.

The fix was to, at least for now, mark the circularly dependent services as non-transactional. Of course in the future if I need those services to be transactional it seems I will need to re-architect my service setup.