FactoryBeans and the annotation-based configuration in Spring 3.0

Question

Spring provides the FactoryBean interface to allow non-trivial initialisation of beans. The framework provides many implementations of factory beans and -- when using Spring's XML config -- factory beans are easy to use.

However, in Spring 3.0, I can't find a satisfactory way of using factory beans with the annotation-based configuration (née JavaConfig).

Obviously, I could manually instantiate the factory bean and set any required properties myself, like so:

@Configuration
public class AppConfig {

...

    @Bean
    public SqlSessionFactory sqlSessionFactory() throws Exception {
        SqlSessionFactoryBean factory = new SqlSessionFactoryBean();
        factory.setDataSource(dataSource());
        factory.setAnotherProperty(anotherProperty());

        return factory.getObject();
    }

However, this would fail if the FactoryBean implemented any Spring-specific callback interfaces, like InitializingBean, ApplicationContextAware, BeanClassLoaderAware, or @PostConstruct for example. I also need to inspect the FactoryBean, find out what callback interfaces it implements, then implement this functionality myself by calling setApplicationContext, afterPropertiesSet() etc.

This feels awkward and back-to-front to me: application-developers should not have to implement the callbacks of the IOC container.

Does anyone know of a better solution to using FactoryBeans from Spring Annotation configs?

Answer 1

As far as I understand your problem is what you want a result of sqlSessionFactory() to be a SqlSessionFactory (for use in other methods), but you have to return SqlSessionFactoryBean from a @Bean-annotated method in order to trigger Spring callbacks.

It can be solved with the following workaround:

@Configuration 
public class AppConfig { 
    @Bean(name = "sqlSessionFactory")
    public SqlSessionFactoryBean sqlSessionFactoryBean() { ... }

    // FactoryBean is hidden behind this method
    public SqlSessionFactory sqlSessionFactory() {
        try {
            return sqlSessionFactoryBean().getObject();
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException(ex);
        }
    }

    @Bean
    public AnotherBean anotherBean() {
        return new AnotherBean(sqlSessionFactory());
    }
}

The point is that calls to @Bean-annotated methods are intercepted by an aspect which performs initialization of the beans being returned (FactoryBean in your case), so that call to sqlSessionFactoryBean() in sqlSessionFactory() returns a fully initialized FactoryBean.