How do I programmatically enable "annotation-config" in spring ApplicationContext

Question

Normally enabling annotations in spring such as @Autowired is done by including this in the spring XML.

  <context:annotation-config/>

Is there a way I can do this programmatically on the ApplicationContext (or implementation) before initialising it?

Answer 1

Simply using the AnnotationConfigApplicationContext class in the @Configuration class is sufficient. The java based container configuration doesn't depend on doing a component scan in any way. Its merely a different approach for the XML based component configuration.

Go through these links :

coderanch

Spring annotations - @Configuration to invoke spring bean auto-building

Answer 2

I struggled a lot with this one, as a workaround i created a simple spring-aspect-config.xml file with following content

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
     http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
     http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
     http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">

    <context:spring-configured/>

and added it as import to my Application context class

@ImportResource("classpath:spring-aspect-config.xml")

Programmatically you can do the same by specifying

@EnableSpringConfigured 

on you application context class.

Reference - https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-7888

Answer 3

If you really need this hack, you could look at AnnotationConfigBeanDefinitionParser.parse() to check how it manipulates the context and what kind of bean definitions it registers with it, then try to reproduce that programmatically using the ApplicationContext implementation to achieve the same effects.

This post may help on how to add new bean definitions to the bean registry.