Question

I was wondering if it is possible to specify x amount of the same bean in a list in Spring. For example, instead of having beans with ids: stage1, stage2,… stageN, as here:

<bean id="stage1" class="Stageclass"/>
<bean id="stage2" class="Stageclass"/>

<bean id="stages" class="java.util.ArrayList">
    <constructor-arg>
        <list>
            <ref bean="stage1" />
            <ref bean="stage2" />                
        </list>
    </constructor-arg>
</bean>

Would it be possible to do something like the following?:

<bean id="stage1" class="Stageclass"/>

<bean id="stages" class="java.util.ArrayList">
    <constructor-arg>
        <list>
            <ref bean="stage1" duplicate="20 times"/>
        </list>
    </constructor-arg>
</bean>

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Lookup method injection from http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html solved the problem. Just needed to make sure the bean I wanted multiple instances of had scope=”prototype”