How to register collection of beans with application context and make eligible for autowiring?

Question

I would like to create dynamic list of Spring managed beans in my @Configuration annotated AppConfig:

@Bean
List<SomeObject> createSomeObjects(@Value("${object.count}") final int objectCount) {

    List<Object> objects = new ArrayList<>();
    for (int i = 1; i <= objectCount; i++) {
        objects.add(new SomeObject())
    }
    return objects;
}

Then, I would like to inject this List of objects into another bean like this:

@Autowired
List<SomeObject> objects;

What I am getting is the following exception:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Could not autowire field: java.util.List ..

I could create some sort of container for my object list, but am looking for a more elegant solution.

Answer 1

Spring handles collections specially, and this just doesn't work; the container always interprets a collection as the group of individually declared beans. After some discussion and modifications it will work in 4.3, but for now, the best solution is to use a holder class.