Spring Exclude Bean From Autowiring

This tutorial shows you how to exclude beans from autowiring. The <beans/> element has a autowire-candidate attribute which you can set to false to tell the container to make the bean unavailable for autowiring.

Beans

The @Autowired annotation of the Person bean makes the Job bean eligible for autowiring.

package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;

public class Person {

    private String name;
    private Job job;

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    @Autowired
    public void setJob(Job job) {
        this.job = job;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Person{" +
                "name='" + name + '\'' +
                ", job=" + job +
                '}';
    }
}

The Job bean will be autowired in the Person bean.

package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired;

public class Job {

    private String name;

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Job{" +
                "name='" + name + '\'' +
                '}';
    }
}

Exclude bean from Autowiring

You can exclude a bean from autowiring using the autowire-candidate attribute of the <beans/> element. This makes the bean unavailable to the spring container for autowiring.

<?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 class="com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired.Job" autowire-candidate="false">
        <property name="name" value="Java Developer"/>
    </bean>

    <bean class="com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired.Person">
        <property name="name" value="John Doe"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

Running The Application

package com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public class Run {

    public static void main(String... args) {
        ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("app-config.xml");
        Person person = context.getBean(Person.class);
        System.out.println(person);
    }
}

Output

This will throw a NoSuchBeanDefinitionException exception because no bean definition was found.

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No qualifying bean of type [com.memorynotfound.spring.core.autowired.Job] found for dependency: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. Dependency annotations: {}

References

• Autowire-Candidate Doc

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