I have a Spring component that has 8 members.
I am currently autowiring these 8 members with field injection.
I now want make these members private final, and do constructor injection to set them.
This is easy enough to do, but now I have a component constructor with 8 parameters.
I know I can use setter injection and set these values in an XML file, but this I don't want to do.
Are there any other alternatives?
EDIT:
This component just does a single thing. But that involves calling several other services. Hence the 8 injections
Firstly, there is no alternative.
Secondly, if a contructor has 8 parameters, it is not designed properly. I think you should rethink about the class structure and responsibility. Consider splitting the class into two or three separate beans and inject those.
If a constructor has 8 arguments, in most cases it will be vioalating SRP(Single Responsibility principle)
First of all you can set the initial values of these parameters in an .properties file and then read this property file as a pojo configuration class and it is very easy in spring to convert .properties file into pojo.
so the constructor will be something like this
#Autowired
public Temp(ConfigPojoClass config) {
.....
}
Related
I am trying to learn spring dependency injection.
I want to know when there is need of default constructor in dependency injection
and what happen if we do not use default constructor explicitly
You have to provide a default constructor, if you plan on instantiating the bean without any arguments.
You should only provide a default constructor if there is a safe way to instantiate the bean that way - let the code document itself.
It is much better to include your bean's dependencies as constructor parameters, which allows you to make it very clear what your bean needs. The following is very clear:
#Autowired
public MyBean(WidgetService widgetService, NutService nutService, BoltService boltService) {
Whereas a default constructor for MyBean with the #Autowired annotation on various setters can get you into situations where the bean doesn't have all the dependencies it needs:
public MyBean() {
This is very useful when instantiating the bean manually, for example when testing the object.
Also, don't confuse the needs of Hibernate and other mapping solutions which tend to need a default constructor as well as a parameterised one, with other objects such as Spring Beans which don't. Mapping solutions tend to create an empty instance of the POJO (Plain Old Java Object) and then call setters to store values when unmarshalling from the database/XML/JSON/etc.
I read in some posts about Spring MVC and Portlets that field injection is not recommended. As I understand it, field injection is when you inject a Bean with #Autowired like this:
#Component
public class MyComponent {
#Autowired
private Cart cart;
}
During my research I also read about constructor injection:
#Component
public class MyComponent {
private final Cart cart;
#Autowired
public MyComponent(Cart cart){
this.cart = cart;
}
}
What are the advantages and the disadvantages of both of these types of injections?
EDIT 1: As this question is marked as duplicate of this question i checked it. Cause there aren't any code examples neither in the question nor in the answers it's not clear to me if i'm correct with my guess which injection type i'm using.
Injection types
There are three options for how dependencies can be injected into a bean:
Through a constructor
Through setters or other methods
Through reflection, directly into fields
You are using option 3. That is what is happening when you use #Autowired directly on your field.
Injection guidelines
A general guideline, which is recommended by Spring (see the sections on Constructor-based DI or Setter-based DI) is the following:
For mandatory dependencies or when aiming for immutability, use constructor injection
For optional or changeable dependencies, use setter injection
Avoid field injection in most cases
Field injection drawbacks
The reasons why field injection is frowned upon are as follows:
You cannot create immutable objects, as you can with constructor injection
Your classes have tight coupling with your DI container and cannot be used outside of it
Your classes cannot be instantiated (for example in unit tests) without reflection. You need the DI container to instantiate them, which makes your tests more like integration tests
Your real dependencies are hidden from the outside and are not reflected in your interface (either constructors or methods)
It is really easy to have like ten dependencies. If you were using constructor injection, you would have a constructor with ten arguments, which would signal that something is fishy. But you can add injected fields using field injection indefinitely. Having too many dependencies is a red flag that the class usually does more than one thing, and that it may violate the Single Responsibility Principle.
Conclusion
Depending on your needs, you should primarily use constructor injection or some mix of constructor and setter injection. Field injection has many drawbacks and should be avoided. The only advantage of field injection is that it is more convenient to write, which does not outweigh all the cons.
Further reading
I wrote a blog article about why field injection is usually not recommended: Field Dependency Injection Considered Harmful.
This is one of the never-ending discussions in software development, but major influencers in the industry are getting more opinionated about the topic and started to suggest constructor injection as the better option.
Constructor injection
Pros:
Better testability. You do not need any mocking library or a Spring context in unit tests. You can create an object that you want to test with the new keyword. Such tests are always faster because they do not rely on the reflection mechanism. (This question was asked 30 minutes later. If the author had used constructor injection it would not have appeared).
Immutability. Once the dependencies are set they cannot be changed.
Safer code. After execution of a constructor your object is ready to use as you can validate anything that was passed as a parameter. The object can be either ready or not, there is no state in-between. With field injection you introduce an intermediate step when the object is fragile.
Cleaner expression of mandatory dependencies. Field injection is ambiguous in this matter.
Makes developers think about the design. dit wrote about a constructor with 8 parameters, which actually is the sign of a bad design and the God object anti-pattern. It does not matter whether a class has 8 dependencies in its constructor or in fields, it is always wrong. People are more reluctant to add more dependencies to a constructor than via fields. It works as a signal to your brain that you should stop for a while and think about your code structure.
Cons:
More code (but modern IDEs alleviate the pain).
Basically, the field injection is the opposite.
Matter of taste. It is your decision.
But I can explain, why I never use constructor injection.
I don't want to implement a constructor for all my #Service, #Repository and #Controller beans. I mean, there are about 40-50 beans or more. Every time if I add a new field I would have to extend the constructor. No. I don't want it and I don't have to.
What if your Bean (Service or Controller) requires a lot of other beans to be injected? A constructor with 4+ parameters is very ugly.
If I'm using CDI, constructor does not concern me.
EDIT #1:
Vojtech Ruzicka said:
class has too many dependencies and is probably violating single
responsibility principle and should be refactored
Yes. Theory and reality.
Here is en example: DashboardController mapped to single path *:8080/dashboard.
My DashboardController collects a lot of informations from other services to display them in a dashboard / system overview page. I need this single controller. So I have to secure only this one path (basic auth or user role filter).
EDIT #2:
Since everyone is focused on the 8 parameters in the constructor... This was a real-world example - an customers legacy code. I've changed that. The same argumentation applies to me for 4+ parameters.
It's all about code injection, not instance construction.
One more comment - Vojtech Ruzicka stated that Spring injects beans in such three ways (the answer with the biggest numbers of points) :
Through a constructor
Through setters or other methods
Through reflection, directly into fields
This answer is WRONG - because FOR EVERY KIND OF INJECTION SPRING USES REFLECTION!
Use IDE, set breakpoint on setter / constructor, and check.
This can be a matter of taste but it can also be a matter of a CASE.
#dieter provided an excellent case when field injection is better. If You're using field injection in integration tests that are setting up Spring context - the argument with testability of the class is also invalid - unless You want to write later on tests to Your integration tests ;)
I'm having a hard time understanding why javabeans are necessary and why they didn't just place the javabean features directly into the object class(root class) in java?
My understanding is you turn an object(instance) into a java bean and that way you get all the benefits like serializable and so on for all the objects in the bean. But if that is the case, why even have a separate bean class for this, why not just have built into the root object class?
Or am I not understand this?
You are not understanding it correctly.
There is no actual Java class or interface that is a bean. It is merely a pattern, a convention.
The bean convention is basically that a class will publicly expose some or all of its properties via public getXxx and setXxx methods, where XXX is the name of the property.
Beans generally should be serializable, but any class can be serializable, and does not need to follow the bean convention.
Besides that answer by Grey: even if there would be a Bean interface or method - not every fruit is an apple!
Meaning: there are zillions of classes that are just fine NOT being beans.
Beyond that: serialization as java does it was often found to be not that helpful. There are good reasons why we mostly serialize into JSON nowadays. In other words: we are pretty happy now that not all classes implement Serializeable by default; because Object being a Bean.
Just to talk about the no-argument constructor part of the bean pattern: A class does have a no argument constructor by default, but as soon as you create another constructor, that effectively removes it, as you probably know. But if you were forced to always have a no-argument constructor, this would be really annoying if you had a class which had a final field which is assigned by an argument in the constructor. You would then need to have some no argument constructor which either assigns everything to null, or throws an exception to tell other developers not to use the no argument so, which is just ugly.
I would like to make sure if I understand this correctly. Spring needs a setter to inject a field reference? Couldn't it do it by just detecting it as a public field?
Is there an alternative to this. From what I understand Java EE's #Inject annotation can do this without any problem. But I have always been inclined more to Spring.
This depends on how you're creating your bean. Spring does not require setters. There are a number of other ways:
Autowiring (with or without Qualifiers) via annotation at the field level
Constructor injection (either by xml or annotations in the code)
Public fields (as you suggested) might work, though i have never tried it, and would advise against it even if it does.
Unfortunately, the XML approach does not look into private fields (that i know of). You either need to add a setter, use the constructor, or set up some sort of autowiring.
Keep in mind, autowiring can be combined with XML. Spring will pay attention to your wiring annotations even if you create your bean via xml (as opposed to something like #Component and component scanning).
It is not necessary to have Setter to inject a reference, you can use Autowire on a public variable of a class or on the setter method, u can also inject beans using constructor-arg which is a good way of injecting dependencies and autowiring can be done on Constructors also. #inject also does the same functionality as #autowired, however #Autowired has an additional behaviour where it internally also uses #required attribute, to see if the bean has a references and injected properly.
Spring provides several alternatives for DI besides setter injection. For example, you can use constructor injection. Alternatively, you can use Spring's #Autowired annotation for constructor, field or setter injection. Since you mentioned it, I guess that you would also be interested in knowing that Spring supports the #Inject annotation.
I am testing a set of classes that will, ultimately, be used to create beans within Spring contexts. I am using JUnit for testing. I want to ensure that when instances of these classes are instantiated programmatically within a test that the life-cycle methods and the #Required setters are correctly called. I know I can do this via a plain-old-java-proxy but am wondering if there exists specific tools within Spring (or elsewhere) that will help me.
I am looking to write something like
X x = ???.newBeanInstance(X.class);
x.setFoo(foo);
x.setBar(bar);
x.$postConstruct();
...
x.$preDestroy();
x = null;
The other, less desirable, option is to just create the context's XML and use it to initialize the instances.
If you bring-up the whole context, you can use the spring-test package and its #ContextConfiguration.
If you want to handle things manually, you are on your own (almost). If you have field injection, you can use ReflectionTestUtils to set dependencies. But apart from that you:
instantiate the object with new X()
call setters
call the initializer method (you should know which one it is)
call the destruction method in the end