Guide to Spring @Autowired

1. Overview

Starting with Spring 2.5, the framework introduced annotations-driven Dependency Injection. The main annotation of this feature is @Autowired. It allows Spring to resolve and inject collaborating beans into our bean.

In this tutorial, we’ll first take a look at how to enable autowiring and the various ways to autowire beans. Afterward, we’ll talk about resolving bean conflicts using @Qualifier annotation, as well as potential exception scenarios.

2. Enabling @Autowired Annotations

The Spring framework enables automatic dependency injection. In other words, by declaring all the bean dependencies in a Spring configuration file, Spring container can autowire relationships between collaborating beans. This is called Spring bean autowiring.

To use Java-based configuration in our application, let’s enable annotation-driven injection to load our Spring configuration:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan("com.baeldung.autowire.sample")
public class AppConfig {}

Alternatively, the <context:annotation-config> annotation is mainly used to activate the dependency injection annotations in Spring XML files.

Moreover, Spring Boot introduces the @SpringBootApplication annotation. This single annotation is equivalent to using @Configuration, @EnableAutoConfiguration, and @ComponentScan.

Let’s use this annotation in the main class of the application:

@SpringBootApplication
public class App {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(App.class, args);
    }
}

As a result, when we run this Spring Boot application, it will automatically scan the components in the current package and its sub-packages. Thus it will register them in Spring’s Application Context, and allow us to inject beans using @Autowired.

3. Using @Autowired

After enabling annotation injection, we can use autowiring on properties, setters, and constructors.

3.1. @Autowired on Properties

Let’s see how we can annotate a property using @Autowired. This eliminates the need for getters and setters.

First, let’s define a fooFormatter bean:

@Component("fooFormatter")
public class FooFormatter {
    public String format() {
        return "foo";
    }
}

Then, we’ll inject this bean into the FooService bean using @Autowired on the field definition:

@Component
public class FooService {  
    @Autowired
    private FooFormatter fooFormatter;
}

As a result, Spring injects fooFormatter when FooService is created.

3.2. @Autowired on Setters

Now let’s try adding @Autowired annotation on a setter method.

In the following example, the setter method is called with the instance of FooFormatter when FooService is created:

public class FooService {
    private FooFormatter fooFormatter;
    @Autowired
    public void setFormatter(FooFormatter fooFormatter) {
        this.fooFormatter = fooFormatter;
    }
}

3.3. @Autowired on Constructors

Finally, let’s use @Autowired on a constructor.

We’ll see that an instance of FooFormatter is injected by Spring as an argument to the FooService constructor:

public class FooService {
    private FooFormatter fooFormatter;
    @Autowired
    public FooService(FooFormatter fooFormatter) {
        this.fooFormatter = fooFormatter;
    }
}

4. @Autowired and Optional Dependencies

When a bean is being constructed, the @Autowired dependencies should be available. Otherwise, if Spring cannot resolve a bean for wiring, it will throw an exception.

Consequently, it prevents the Spring container from launching successfully with an exception of the form:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: 
No qualifying bean of type [com.autowire.sample.FooDAO] found for dependency: 
expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. 
Dependency annotations: 
{@org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired(required=true)}

To fix this, we need to declare a bean of the required type:

public class FooService {
    @Autowired(required = false)
    private FooDAO dataAccessor; 
}

5. Autowire Disambiguation

By default, Spring resolves @Autowired entries by type. If more than one bean of the same type is available in the container, the framework will throw a fatal exception.

To resolve this conflict, we need to tell Spring explicitly which bean we want to inject.

5.1. Autowiring by @Qualifier

For instance, let’s see how we can use the @Qualifier annotation to indicate the required bean.

First, we’ll define 2 beans of type Formatter:

@Component("fooFormatter")
public class FooFormatter implements Formatter {
    public String format() {
        return "foo";
    }
}

@Component("barFormatter")
public class BarFormatter implements Formatter {
    public String format() {
        return "bar";
    }
}

Now let’s try to inject a Formatter bean into the FooService class:

public class FooService {
    @Autowired
    private Formatter formatter;
}

In our example, there are two concrete implementations of Formatter available for the Spring container. As a result, Spring will throw a NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException exception when constructing the FooService:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException: 
No qualifying bean of type [com.autowire.sample.Formatter] is defined: 
expected single matching bean but found 2: barFormatter,fooFormatter

We can avoid this by narrowing the implementation using a @Qualifier annotation:

public class FooService {
    @Autowired
    @Qualifier("fooFormatter")
    private Formatter formatter;
}

When there are multiple beans of the same type, it’s a good idea to use @Qualifier to avoid ambiguity.

Please note that the value of the @Qualifier annotation matches with the name declared in the @Component annotation of our FooFormatter implementation.

5.2. Autowiring by Custom Qualifier

Spring also allows us to create our own custom @Qualifier annotation. To do so, we should provide the @Qualifier annotation with the definition:

@Qualifier
@Target({
  ElementType.FIELD, ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.TYPE, ElementType.PARAMETER})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface FormatterType {  
    String value();
}

Then we can use the FormatterType within various implementations to specify a custom value:

@FormatterType("Foo")
@Component
public class FooFormatter implements Formatter {
    public String format() {
        return "foo";
    }
}

@FormatterType("Bar")
@Component
public class BarFormatter implements Formatter {
    public String format() {
        return "bar";
    }
}

Finally, our custom Qualifier annotation is ready to use for autowiring:

@Component
public class FooService {  
    @Autowired
    @FormatterType("Foo")
    private Formatter formatter;
}

The value specified in the @Target meta-annotation restricts where to apply the qualifier, which in our example is fields, methods, types, and parameters.

5.3. Autowiring by Name

Spring uses the bean’s name as a default qualifier value. It will inspect the container and look for a bean with the exact name as the property to autowire it.

Hence, in our example, Spring matches the fooFormatter property name to the FooFormatter implementation. Therefore, it injects that specific implementation when constructing FooService:

public class FooService {
 @Autowired 
private Formatter fooFormatter; 
}

6. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed autowiring and the different ways to use it. We also examined ways to solve two common autowiring exceptions caused by either a missing bean or an ambiguous bean injection.