How to collect and inject all beans of a given type in Spring XML configuration

Question

One of the strongest accents of the Spring framework is the Dependency Injection concept. I understand one of the advices behind that is to separate general high-level mechanism from low-level details (as announced by Dependency Inversion Principle).

Technically, that boils down to having a bean implementation to know as little as possible about a bean being injected as a dependency, e.g.

public class PrintOutBean {
    private LogicBean logicBean;
    public void action() {
        System.out.println(logicBean.humanReadableDetails());
    }
    //...
}

<bean class="PrintOutBean">
    <property name="loginBean" ref="ShoppingCartBean"/>
</bean>

But what if I wanted to a have a high-level mechanism operating on multiple dependent beans?

  public class MenuManagementBean {
       private Collection<Option> options;
       public void printOut() {
            for (Option option:options) {
              // do something for option
            }
            //...
       }
  }

I know one solution would be to use @Autowired annotation in the singleton bean, that is...

  @Autowired
  private Collection<Option> options;

But doesn't it violate the separation principle? Why do I have to specify what dependents to take in the very same place I use them (i.e. MenuManagementBean class in my example)? Is there a way to inject collections of beans in the XML configuration like this (without any annotation in the MMB class)?

<bean class="MenuManagementBean">
    <property name="options">
       <xxx:autowire by-type="MyOptionImpl"/>
    </property>
 </bean>

Answer 1

There's no out-of-the-box facility to do this, no. However, if you want a way of collecting all beans of a given type into a collection, without using an @Autowired list, then it's easy to write a custom FactoryBean to do it for you:

public class BeanListFactoryBean<T> extends AbstractFactoryBean<Collection<T>> {

    private Class<T> beanType;
    private @Autowired ListableBeanFactory beanFactory;

    @Required
    public void setBeanType(Class<T> beanType) {
        this.beanType = beanType;
    }

    @Override
    protected Collection<T> createInstance() throws Exception {
        return beanFactory.getBeansOfType(beanType).values();
    }

    @Override
    public Class<?> getObjectType() {
        return Collection.class;
    }    
}

and then

 <bean class="MenuManagementBean">
    <property name="options">
       <bean class="BeanListFactoryBean">
          <property name="beanType" class="MyOptionImpl.class"/>
       </bean>
    </property>
 </bean>

However, this all seems like a lot of effort to avoid putting @Autowired in your original class. It's not much of a violation of SoC, if it is at all - there's no compiltime dependency, and no knowledge of where the options are coming from.

Answer 2

Alternative to @Autowired, using a context file: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html#beans-factory-autowire

So you'd have:

<bean class="MenuManagementBean" autowire="byType" />

Other properties can be specified, as normal, and that would override the autowiring only for those properties.