Spring supports three types of dependency injections:
Constructor injection
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 | @Componentpublic class SecondBeanImpl implements SecondBean { private FirstBean firstBean; @Autowired public SecondBeanImpl(FirstBean firstBean) { this.firstBean = firstBean; }} |
That is similar to:
1 2 | FirstBean firstBean = new FirstBeanImpl();SecondBean secondBean = new SecondBeanImpl(firstBean); |
This type of dependency injection instantiates and initializes the object.
In this approach, beans are immutable and dependencies are not null. However, if you define many parameters in the constructor, your code is not clean.
From Spring 4.3 the @Autowired annotation is not required if the class has a single constructor.
Setter injection
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 | @Componentpublic class SecondBeanImpl implements SecondBean { private FirstBean firstBean; @Autowired public setFirstBean(FirstBean firstBean) { this.firstBean = firstBean; }} |
That is similar to:
1 2 3 | FirstBean firstBean = new FirstBeanImpl();SecondBean secondBean = new SecondBeanImpl();secondBean.setFirstBean(firstBean); |
In this approach, beans are not immutable (the setter could be called later), and not mandatory dependencies can lead to NullPointerExceptions.
Field injection
1 2 3 4 5 6 | @Componentpublic class SecondBeanImpl implements SecondBean { @Autowired private FirstBean firstBean;} |
This approach may look cleaner but hides the dependencies and makes testing difficult. While constructor and setter injections use proxies, field injection uses reflection which could affect the performance. Could be used in test classes.
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Eidher Julian, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Spring Injection Types Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
