Question

I have a service that I want to inject into multiple client classes. I don’t want to add the property to the bean definitions of all the classes that need this service so I created an interface with a setter method which is implemented by each of the clients classes. In the xml config, I have one abstract bean for the interface which is wired to receive the service as a property. The idea is for client bean to have the bean for the interface as a parent. However many of the clients already have parents. Is it possible for a bean to have multiple parernts is spring – this seems like a reasonable thing to do as a class can implement multiple interfaces in java.

Answer 1

Sounds like what you actually want to do is to implement a BeanPostProcessor. Such component get to inspect any bean that is created in the spring context and sense the presence of the interface, and in that case set the service you need.