Inject bean dependency into Spring application context

Question

I have this class that creates an application context from XML:

public class SpringModel {
    public SpringModel(Object dependency) {
        ApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(...);
        Foo foo = (Foo) applicationContext.getBean("foo");
    }
}

The bean named "foo" has a constructor that looks like this:

public Foo(Object dependency) {
    ...
}

I want to inject the argument from SpringModel 's constructor into the constructor for Foo . Is this possible?

Answer 1

If you're using an xml based application context you could define the dependencies like

  <beans>
    <bean id="dependencyObj" class="Object"/>

    <bean id="springModelObj" class="SpringModel">
        <constructor-arg ref="dependencyObj"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="foo" class="Foo">
      <constructor-arg ref="dependencyObj" />
    </bean>
</beans>

It might also be easier to have your Foo object reference be a private variable in the SpringModel class with an appropriate setter method. Then you could link it to the SpringModel bean in the xml configuration with a property tag.