For the particular use case detailed in SPR-8514, with this change we
now attempt to determine the object type of a FactoryBean through its
generic type parameter if possible.
For (a contrived) example:
@Configuration
public MyConfig {
@Bean
public FactoryBean<String> fb() {
return new StringFactoryBean("foo");
}
}
The implementation will now look at the <String> generic parameter
instead of attempting to instantiate the FactoryBean in order to call
its #getObjectType() method.
This is important in order to avoid the autowiring lifecycle issues
detailed in SPR-8514. For example, prior to this change, the following
code would fail:
@Configuration
public MyConfig {
@Autowired Foo foo;
@Bean
public FactoryBean<String> fb() {
Assert.notNull(foo);
return new StringFactoryBean("foo");
}
}
The reason for this failure is that in order to perform autowiring,
the container must first determine the object type of all configured
FactoryBeans. Clearly a chicken-and-egg issue, now fixed by this
change.
And lest this be thought of as an obscure bug, keep in mind the use case
of our own JPA support: in order to configure and return a
LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean from a @Bean method, one will
need access to a DataSource, etc -- resources that are likely to
be @Autowired across @Configuration classes for modularity purposes.
Note that while the examples above feature methods with return
types dealing directly with the FactoryBean interface, of course
the implementation deals with subclasses/subinterfaces of FactoryBean
equally as well. See ConfigurationWithFactoryBeanAndAutowiringTests
for complete examples.
There is at least a slight risk here, in that the signature of a
FactoryBean-returing @Bean method may advertise a generic type for the
FactoryBean less specific than the actual object returned (or than
advertised by #getObjectType for that matter). This could mean that an
autowiring target may be missed, that we end up with a kind of
autowiring 'false negative' where FactoryBeans are concerned. This is
probably a less common scenario than the need to work with an autowired
field within a FactoryBean-returning @Bean method, and also has a clear
workaround of making the generic return type more specific.
Issue: SPR-8514
807d612978