Spring @Autowired Field Null – Common Causes and Solutions

Last updated: January 8, 2024

Written by: baeldung

Reviewed by: Michal Aibin

Spring+

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll see common errors that lead to a NullPointerException on an Autowired field. We’ll also explain how to fix the problem.

2. Presentation of the Problem

First, let’s define a Spring component with an empty doWork method:

@Component
public class MyComponent {
    public void doWork() {}
}

Then, let’s define our service class. We’ll use Spring capacities to inject a MyComponent bean inside our service so that we can call the doWork method inside the service method:

public class MyService {
    
    @Autowired
    MyComponent myComponent;
    
    public String serve() {
        myComponent.doWork();
        return "success";
    }
}

Now, let’s add a controller which will instantiate a service and call the serve method:

@Controller
public class MyController {
    
    public String control() {
        MyService userService = new MyService();
        return userService.serve();
    }
}

At first glance, our code might look perfectly fine. However, after running the application, calling the control method of our controller will lead to the following exception:

java.lang.NullPointerException: null
  at com.baeldung.autowiring.service.MyService.serve(MyService.java:14)
  at com.baeldung.autowiring.controller.MyController.control(MyController.java:12)

What happened here? When we called the MyService constructor in our controller, we created an object that is not managed by Spring. Having no clue of the existence of this MyService object, Spring is not able to inject a MyComponent bean inside it. Thus, the MyComponent instance inside the MyService object we created will remain null, causing the NullPointerException we get when we try to call a method on this object.

3. Solution

To solve this problem, we have to make the MyService instance used in our controller a Spring-managed Bean.

First, let’s tell Spring to generate a Bean for our MyService class. We have various possibilities to achieve this. The easiest one is to decorate the MyService class with the @Component annotation or any of its derivatives. For example, we could do the following:

@Service
public class MyService {
    
    @Autowired
    MyComponent myComponent;
    
    public String serve() {
        myComponent.doWork();
        return "success";
    }
}

Another alternative to reach the same goal is to add a @Bean method in a @Configuration file:

@Configuration
public class MyServiceConfiguration {

    @Bean
    MyService myService() {
        return new MyService();
    }
}

However, turning MyService class into a Spring-managed bean is not enough. Now, we have to autowire it inside our controller, instead of calling new on it. Let’s see how the fixed version of the controller looks:

@Controller
public class MyController {
    
    @Autowired
    MyService myService;
    
    public String control() {
        return myService.serve();
    }
}

Now, calling the control method will return the result of the serve method as expected.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we have seen a very common error that would cause a NullPointerException when we unintentionally mix Spring injection with objects we create by calling their constructors. We fixed the problem by avoiding this responsibility mic-mac and turned the object we used to managed ourselves into a Spring-managed Bean.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.