I have a bunch of java custom tags that use spring managed beans.. since i cant find a way to inject into a custom tag, i created a helper class that provides static methods to "getTheObjectINeedBean()" for all the spring bean objects i need.. I do not like this approach at all.
i really want to be able to inject a spring managed bean into the custom tag
Is there a way? As far as my research goes, I understand there is no way to do this, because the custom tag is container managed
Thanks,
Billy
You are correct there isn't a simple way to use dependency-injection in jstl tags, because they are not managed by spring, and cannot be. However there are (at least) two workarounds:
@Configurable
- aspectJ allows you to plug a weaver at load-time/compile-time, so that even objects that are not instantiated by spring can be spring aware. See here
You can create a base tag class for your project, and call an init(..)
method from every doStartTag(..)
method. There, you can get the ServletContext
from the pageContext
, and thus obtain the spring ApplicationContext
(via ApplicationContextUtils
). Then:
AutowireCapableBeanFactory factory = appCtx.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory();
factory.autowireBean(this);
Neither options are perfect as they require either some additional code, or some "black magic"
To expand on @Bozho's post, I have gotten this to work like so: (in spring 3.0 there is no ApplicationContextUtils that I could find)
public class LocationTag extends RequestContextAwareTag {
@Autowired
PathComponent path;
...
@Override
protected int doStartTagInternal() throws Exception {
if (path == null) {
log.debug("Autowiring the bean");
WebApplicationContext wac = getRequestContext().getWebApplicationContext();
AutowireCapableBeanFactory acbf = wac.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory();
acbf.autowireBean(this);
}
return SKIP_BODY;
}
}
The solution as described above works but some background and additional code snippets are, quite likely, useful.
1) The doStartTagInternal method is invoked from the doStartTag method.
2) I was forced to set the pageContext first before invoking the doStartTag
3) I did a lookup of the bean as opposed to the autowiring. To me this seems more straightforward: (YourBeanProxy) autowireCapableBeanFactory.getBean("yourBeanName")
Hopefully this additional info is useful.