Create spring managed beans with factory

Question

I have a spring application in which I am trying to inject many beans of the same type. I do not know how many of these beans there will be before runtime, so it seems natural to use the factory pattern, as I cannot configure each bean in my java config class. However, these beans need to have some of their fields wired by Spring, and when I create them with "new" in my factory, they are of course not Spring managed.

Is there a way to have the beans I create in my factory class be managed by Spring? Or is the factory pattern the wrong way to go about this?

I am fairly new to posting, so please let me know if any more information is necessary.

Answer 1

You can define a beanFactory wired with the dependencies needed for your bean, then manually injected them in each new bean created by the beanFactory. For example:

public class MyBean { 

   private Dependency1 dep1;
   private Dependency2 dep2;

   public MyBean(Dependency1 dep1, Dependency2 dep2) { 
      this.dep1 = dep1;
      this.dep2 = dep2;
   }
} 

@Component
public class MyBeanFactory {

    @Autowired 
    private Dependency1 dep1;

    @Autowired 
    private Dependency2 dep2;


    public MyBean createInstance() {
       return new MyBean(dep1, dep2);
    }      
}


@Component
public class MyBeanConsumer {
      @Autowired
      private MyBeanFactory myBeanFactory;


       public void foo() {                  
           final MyBean bean = myBeanFactory.createInstance();
       }     
}