Question

I have a singleton bean which needs for each call of a function to return a reference to a different (new) prototype bean. The only way that I can think of doing this is to programmatically retrieve a new prototype bean instance from the BeanFactory/ApplicatioContext by invoking its getBean() method. Code sample will follow…

Is there a better way to do this? Only via configuration, hopefully? (Personally, I doubt there is…)

<bean id="protoBean" scope="prototype"
        class="com.blahblah.ProtoBean" />

<bean id="singletonBean"
        class="com.blahblah.SingletonBean" />

public class ProtoBean {

    ....
}

public class SingletonBean {

    private BeanFactory factory;

    public ProtoBean dispense() {
        return (ProtoBean) factory.getBean("protoBean");
    }

    ....
}

Answer 1

take a look at Method Injection