How to Disable/Skip @Required Annotation For Class
When you see this title, you may think “why should I skip a required field, can’t I just remove the annotation?”. And you are probably right. But imagine when you are using a third-party library which contains some @Required annotations that are badly placed, you do have the option to disable or skip the @Required annotation. Let’s see how.
Marking setter method with @Required
Suppose we have a class with the @Required annotation. But we want to disable or skip this annotation. We don’t have the source code of this library so we cannot change or remove the annotation.
package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.required;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Required;
public class StarWars {
private TheForce theForce;
public TheForce getTheForce() {
return theForce;
}
@Required
public void setTheForce(TheForce theForce) {
this.theForce = theForce;
}
}This class is marked as required in the previous one.
package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.required;
public class TheForce {
}Disable or Skip @Required Dependency Checking for class
To disable or skip the @Required annotation for a class we can configure the bean definition with a meta element with the org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.RequiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.skipRequiredCheck and assign a value of true. This will skip the required annotation completely for that class.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">
<context:annotation-config/>
<bean id="luke" class="com.memorynotfound.spring.core.required.StarWars">
<meta key="org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.RequiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.skipRequiredCheck" value="true"/>
</bean>
</beans>Running the application
Note that the StarWars has a required annotation. We skipped the validation of this class. So when we boot the application without providing a value, we’ll see that the application boots successfully.
package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.required;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
public class Main {
public static void main(String... args) {
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("app-config.xml");
StarWars starWars = (StarWars)context.getBean("luke");
System.out.println(starWars);
}
}