java - Spring injection Into Servlet

Question

So I have seen this question:

Spring dependency injection to other instance

and was wondering if my method will work out.

1) Declare beans in my Spring application context

    <bean id="dataSource" destroy-method="close" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource">
        <property name="driverClassName" value="${jdbc.driverClassName}"/>
        <property name="url" value="${jdbc.url}" />
        <property name="username" value="${jdbc.username}" />
        <property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}" />
        <property name="initialSize" value="${jdbc.initialSize}" />
        <property name="validationQuery" value="${jdbc.validationQuery}" /> 
        <property name="testOnBorrow" value="${jdbc.testOnBorrow}" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="apiData" class="com.mydomain.api.data.ApiData">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
        <property name="apiLogger" ref="apiLogger" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="apiLogging" class="com.mydomain.api.data.ApiLogger">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    </bean>

2) Override my servlet's init method as shown:

    @Override
    public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
       super.init(config);

       ApplicationContext ac = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml");

       this.apiData = (ApiData)ac.getBean("apiData");
       this.apiLogger = (ApiLogger)ac.getBean("apiLogger");
    }

Will this work or is Spring not yet ready to deliver beans to my servlet at this point in the web applications deployment? Do I have to do something more traditional like putting the beans in web.xml?

Answer 1

I wanted to leverage on the solution provided by Sotirios Delimanolis but adding transparent autowiring to the mix. The idea is to turn plain servlets into autowire-aware objects.

So I created a parent abstract servlet class that retrieves the Spring context, gets and autowiring-capable factory and uses that factory to autowire the servlet instances (the subclasess, actually). I also store the factory as an instance variable in case the subclasses need it.

So the parent abstract servlet looks like this:

public abstract class AbstractServlet extends HttpServlet {

    protected AutowireCapableBeanFactory ctx;

    @Override
    public void init() throws ServletException {
        super.init();
        ctx = ((ApplicationContext) getServletContext().getAttribute(
                "applicationContext")).getAutowireCapableBeanFactory();
        //The following line does the magic
        ctx.autowireBean(this);
    }
}

And a sevlet subclass looks like this:

public class EchoServlet extends AbstractServlet {

    @Autowired
    private MyService service;

    @Override
    public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
        throws IOException, ServletException {
        response.getWriter().println("Hello! "+ service.getMyParam());
    }
}

Notice the only thing EchoServlet needs to do is to declare a bean just in common Spring practice. The magic is done in the init() method of the superclass.

I haven't tested it thoroughly. But it worked with a simple bean MyService that also gets a property autowired from a Spring-managed properties file.

Enjoy!

---

Note:

It's best to load the application context with Spring's own context listener like this:

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>classpath:applicationContext.xml</param-value>
</context-param>
<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Then retrieve it like this:

WebApplicationContext context = WebApplicationContextUtils
    .getWebApplicationContext(getServletContext());
ctx = context.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory();
ctx.autowireBean(this);

Only spring-web library needs to be imported, not spring-mvc.