Spring bean initializing dependencies with new keyword?

Question

I have some legacy code where the class is a Spring bean defined and initialized through xml. It is a singleton with a field member which is a class dependency. There is a setter method for it, so I am assuming its supposed to be set via Spring, although I didn't find any xml defining it. There is also a get() method for the dependency, it has a null check and if its null it manually creates it outside of Spring like so

Class Test{
    Dependency d;

    setD(Dependency d){this.d=d;}

    getD(){
        if(this.d==null){
            this.d = new Dependency();
        }return this.d
     }
}

I am trying to understand why this Spring bean is initializing a dependency outside of Spring and what are the implications if any, is this just bad/old design? or Am I not understanding something with how Spring works.

Answer 1

I would say it's a bad design, probably author wanted to provide fall-back for the case when D was not injected in spring. Another idea is an attempt to make D a lazy dependency. You should explore what's inside D.

Generally you can use @Required to mark the members that always should be injected. Or just use simple and nice constructor injection. If you're concerned about lazy injection, that's how Spring works by default.