Can spring container inject collaborators using custom methods?

Question

Normally dependencies are injected via setters by the following configuration (http://static.springsource.org/sprin...beans-beanname) :

<bean id="exampleBean" class="examples.ExampleBean">
    <!-- setter injection using the nested <ref/> element -->
    <property name="beanOne"><ref bean="anotherExampleBean"/></property>

    <!-- setter injection using the neater 'ref' attribute -->
    <property name="beanTwo" ref="yetAnotherBean"/>
    <property name="integerProperty" value="1"/>
</bean>

<bean id="anotherExampleBean" class="examples.AnotherBean"/>
<bean id="yetAnotherBean" class="examples.YetAnotherBean"/>

Lets say the class examples.ExampleBean has a collection listeners objects, and the method addListener(SomeListenerInterface) is the only possible way add listeners. Can I inject listeners declaratively in xml like its done with property setters?

Answer 1

Here goes property Element definition

Property elements correspond to JavaBean setter methods exposed by the bean classes.

To get your goal, you can use @Autowired annotation. It works even when using an arbitrary name

@Autowired
public void inject(SomeListenerInterface someListenerInterface) {
    this.someListenerInterface = someListenerInterface;
}

Answer 2

You could probably conjure up some baroque mechanism for doing this all in XML, but the cleanest way to do this is to use a FactoryBean. You write a class which implement FactoryBean, and which is responsible for constructing and configuring your target object (see Spring docs). Your FactoryBean would have the required getters/setters/autowiring, and injects them into the target object.

This is often the cleanest way to handle non-javabeans in Spring, particularly if you cannot modify the target class.