Question

I have a class “Box” with add method accepting all the fruits:

  public class Box {
        List <IFruit> fruits;

        public void add (IFruit fruit) {
             fruits.add(fruit);
        }
  }

I would like to define with Spring’s applicationContext.xml a singleton instance of this class, which would have all the IFruits implementations added (those appear in a package x.y.fruits, for inst. x.y.fruits.Apple).

The first part is easy:

  <bean id="box" class="x.y.Box"/>

But how to wire all the IFruit instances?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you @Autowire the field, you do not need to define anything, Spring will find all instances of the IFruit interface in the application context and load them in.

public class Box {
    @Autowired
    List <IFruit> fruits; //This should contain all IFruit's in the ApplicationContext

    public void add (IFruit fruit) {
         fruits.add(fruit);
    }
}

Of course, you need to add the element <context:annotation-config/> to your xml configuration for @Autowired to work…