Deserialized bean needs scoped dependencies

Question

How can I inject dependencies into a deserialized bean?

Some of my Spring beans should be serialized during the render-response phase of our JSF application, and then deserialized at the beginning of the next request. Some of those beans have dependencies which are scoped to the request. If I configure the dependencies with the scoped proxy ("<aop:scoped-proxy>"), I can't serialize my dependent beans - the proxy isn't serializable.

So right now we do it by declaring the appropriate member variables of the serialized bean classes as transient, and then calling context.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().configureBean(bean, name) just after deserializing the beans - but this sucks, because the bean's initializer is called again. (As for other dependencies that are in the same scope, are not transient, and are deserialized, I'm not even sure why they don't get overwritten by configureBean, but I don't think they are.)

What's better? Should I just get the bean definition, loop through it, find the dependencies that are scoped to the request, and then call getBean(name) on the context?

(BTW, I'm not sure it makes a difference, but we are using Spring kind of weirdly. We instantiate a new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext for each non-posted-back HTTP request, rather than a single WebApplicationContext. Upon postback, we deserialize the beans. So when I say "scoped to the request", I'm lying; these beans are actually singleton-scoped. I'd like to use the WebApplicationContext and the more sane scoping with it, but as far as I can tell, that's orthogonal to our problem at the moment.)

Answer 1

It makes all the difference - I've been using spring with JSF for quite a long time and hadn't had any serialization problems. The way to go is simply define the following in your faces-config.xml:

<el-resolver>
   org.springframework.web.jsf.el.SpringBeanFacesELResolver
</el-resolver>

This integrates spring with JSF by providing spring beans (using the request and session spring scopes) to JSF pages.

So, I'd advice for changing your approach drastically so that you aren't bug with such problems in the future.