Question

I know what bean alias means in spring. But I want to know the use cases for making use of alias. Why would somebody want to refer a bean using alias name instead of its name?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A usage I’ve seen is the following: you have two instances of a given interface (SomeBean): one for environment A, and one for environment B. So you define two beans: one named “someBeanForA”, and the other one named “someBeanForB”.

The beans where this SomeBean must be injected don’t know which one they must use: it depends on the environment. So they use an alias:

@Autowired
@Qualifier("someBeanAlias")
private SomeBean someBean;

When deploying to the environment A, the alias in the XML file points to someBeanA. When deploying to the environment B, the alias in the XML file points to someBeanB.