Question

Because of a plug-in architecture, I’m trying to add a bean programmatically to my webapp. I have a Spring bean created through the @Component annotation, and i am implementing the ApplicationContextAware interface.

My override function looks like this:

@Override
public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext applicationContext)
        throws BeansException {

    // this fails
    this.applicationContext = (GenericWebApplicationContext) applicationContext;
 }

Basically, I can’t figure out how to add a bean to the applicationContext object given to setApplicationContext. Can anyone tell me how I am going about this the wrong way?

Ok, this is what i ended up with as the solution:

@Override
public void postProcessBeanDefinitionRegistry(BeanDefinitionRegistry bdr)
        throws BeansException {
    BeanDefinition definition = new RootBeanDefinition(
            <My Class>.class);

    bdr.registerBeanDefinition("<my id>", definition);
}

Answer 1

In Spring 3.0 you can make your bean implement BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor and add new beans via BeanDefinitionRegistry.

In previous versions of Spring you can do the same thing in BeanFactoryPostProcessor (though you need to cast BeanFactory to BeanDefinitionRegistry, which may fail).