Autowiring Generics In Spring
@Autowired is heavily used in Spring for injecting dependencies. By entrusting the framework itself to inject dependencies (eg: repositories interface) programmer can rest assurred and focus on core business logic of the application.
We can also use @Autowired in order to initialize java collections which use Generics. Let’s say we have an interface which could be implemented by a given number of classes. We can Register each of those classes in Spring Context with @Context annotation. Optionally we can also name the component using @Component($name). This becomes particularly useful if we want to assosciate each context with a key-word. Using component name also enables to qualify required bean whenever spring tries to autowire using ualifier($beanName). One use case could be that the key-word is json field name and the corresponding class is the utility class to operate on the model assosciated with that json.
Sample Interface:
interface GenericUpdater{
public boolean act();
}
There are ’n’ number of implementations.
@Component("inventory")
public InventoryUpdater implements GenericUpdater{
@Overrides
public boolean act(){
//do some stuff
return true;
}
}
Now we can Autowire a collection. Let’s say, a map which stores each of those ‘implementors’ with context name.
```java
@Autowired
//Some Generic Collection
Map<String,GenericUpdater> updaterMap;
Spring now scans for all the implementations of GenericUpdater and injects them into this map keyed with the name given in @Component($name).
Stack Overflow answer demo: