Is it possible in Springframework 2.5.6 to have scope="session" create the object on session create

Question

I've got a project using Jetspeed portal and Springframework 2.5.6 where I need a Jetspeed level service to be unique for each user logged in. This would be best done using Spring AOP and scope="session". The problem is, that these are behind the scenes beans that need to be running as soon as the session in initiated. It appears that Spring's AOP chooses a lazy load design and does not create or init the actual implementation until a method on the bean is called.

Is there a way to force Spring AOP to create the new bean as soon as the session object is created?

Answer 1

An excellent question. The easiest option that springs to mind (if you'll pardon the expression) is to wire your session-scoped bean into the controller that is invoked when the first request of the session comes in (and to do this, the controller would have to either be a session-scoped bean itself, or your bean would need to use aop:scoped-proxy).

If different controllers could be invoked at the start of the session, then you could wire the bean into a session-scoped interceptor instead, and configure your url mapping to pass the requests through the interceptor, ensuring that the bean is initialized right at the start of the session.

I can't really think of a more elegant way to do this. You could potentially create a custom HttpSessionListener which calls getBean("my-session-scoped-bean") on the app context when sessionCreated() is called, but that's a bit clunky.