How SpringBoot dependency injection works with different type of annotations - spring-boot

Question

I recently started exploring Spring Boot. I see that there are 2 ways to define Beans in Spring Boot.
Define #Bean in the class annotated with #SprinBootApplication
Define #Bean in a class annotated with #Configuration
I am also confused about stereo-type annotation #Repository #Service #Controller etc.
Can someone please explain how dependency-injection works with these annotations?

Answer 1

Yes it is possible.
Either you use #Bean in any of your #Configuration or #SpringBootApplication class or mark the bean classes explicitly with annotations like #Service, #Component #Repository etc.
#Service or #Component
When you mark a class with #Service or #Compoenent and if spring's annotation scanning scope allows it to reach to the package, spring will register the instances of those classes as spring beans.
You can provide the packages to be included/excluded during scan with #ComponentScan
#Bean
#Beans are marked on factory methods which can create an instance of a particular class.
#Bean
public Account getAccount(){
return new DailyAccount();
}
Now in you application you can simply #Autowire Account and spring will internally call its factory method getAccount, which in turn returns an instance of DailyAccount.
There is a simple difference of using #Bean vs #Service or #Compoenent.
The first one makes your beans loosely coupled to each other.
In the #Bean, you have flexibility to change the account implementation without even changing any of the account classes.
Consider if your classes instantiation is a multi-step operation like read properties values etc then you can easily do it in your #Bean method.
#Bean also helps if you don't have source code access to the class you are trying to instantiate.

Answer 2

Spring Boot auto-configuration attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the jar dependencies that you have added.
You need to opt-in to auto-configuration by adding the #EnableAutoConfiguration or #SpringBootApplication annotations to one of your #Configuration classes.
You are free to use any of the standard Spring Framework techniques to define your beans and their injected dependencies. For simplicity, we often find that using #ComponentScan (to find your beans) and using #Autowired (to do constructor injection) works well.

Answer 3

One way is to define #Bean in the class annotated with
#SprinBootApplication
If you see #SprinBootApplication it is combination of many annotation, and one of them is #Configuration. So when you define #Bean in the Main class, it means it's inside #Configuration class.
According to Configuration docs :
Indicates that a class declares one or more #Bean methods and may be
processed by the Spring container to generate bean definitions and
service requests for those beans at runtime.
class annotated with #Configuration
When you define #Bean is a class annotated with #Configuration class, it means it is the part of spring configuration all the Beans define in it all available for Dependency-Injection.
I have also seen some code where neither of the 2 above approaches
have been used and yet dependency injection works fine. I have tried
to research a lot on this but could not find any concrete answer to
this. Is this possible?
I am assuming you are talking about Sterio-type annotation. Every sterio type annotation has #Component, according to docs :
Indicates that an annotated class is a "component". Such classes are
considered as candidates for auto-detection when using
annotation-based configuration and classpath scanning.