Question

In all the examples of autowiring that I have found, the example is about one <bean> autowire attribute which is set for example to byName, and the has only one property value which is supposed to be set through autowiring.

My question is what if a <bean> has multiple properties that you want to set through autowiring? No one seems to explain that situation. Can someone explain if I can or if I should use autowire to set multiple properties in a bean? The following is an example of such a situation where I want to set the account and credit properties of the customer bean by autowiring:

<beans>
    <bean name="customer" class="ultratech.com.Customer" autowire="byName">
         <bean name="account"/>
         <bean name="credit>
    </beam>

    <bean name="account" class="ultratech.com.Account"/>
    <bean name="credit" class="ultratech.com.Credit"/>
</beans>

Also, please correct me if I’m wrong, but if I were to use annotation (@Autowire), then my problem is easily solved, since I would be able to add @Autowire to any property of a bean separately.

Answer 1

[EDIT: edited to reflect on updated question]

Your question is much more clear right now. You seem to think (if I follow your thinking properly), that in the autowire="byName" you are supposed to provide a bean name instead of byName value.
That is not correct. The autowire attribute can take a few possible values and byName is one of those. When you set autowire to byName like here:

<bean name="someBean" class="foo.bar.Baz" autowire="byName />

then Spring will look at all the fields in someBean (foo.bar.Baz class) and attempt to wire all fields of this object on a per name basis. That is, (in your case) if a Customer class has a field account, Spring will look in its context and try to find a bean with name account to inject into the Customer bean.

If you define two such beans:

 <bean name="customer" class="ultratech.com.Customer" autowire="byName" />
 <bean name="account" class="ultratech.com.Account" />

then you are good to, if Customer is a class along this lines:

public class Customer {
    (...)
    private Account account;
    (...)
}

Here is what your XML code snippet should look like, assuming that your Customer class has fields named account and credit:

<beans>
    <bean name="customer" class="ultratech.com.Customer" autowire="byName" />
    <bean name="account" class="ultratech.com.Account" />
    <bean name="credit" class="ultratech.com.Credit" />
</beans>

Apart from “byName” autowiring, you can autowire:

1. no – default – no autowiring
2. byType – looks for a bean of the property type – be wary, though – only one bean of this type is allowed for autowiring byType; if there is more then one an exception is raised
3. constructor – works just like byType, but looks for constructor parameters only; all of constructor parameters have to be satisfied with exactly one bean of each respective type

See Spring reference for more info:
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/beans.html#beans-factory-autowire