Spring 4 bean autowiring with generics - spring

Question

I am using Spring 4 via Spring Boot 1.1.8 and have created a class to cache some data. The class relies on generics to work but I'm having trouble with Spring and autowiring this class as a bean in another service.
I get errors like this:
Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException: No qualifying bean of type [orm.repository.BaseRepository] is defined: expected single matching bean but found 2: dataTypeRepository,propertyNameRepository
The class in question:
/**
* The purpose of this class is to get data from a cache backed by a database
* and if it does not exist to create it and insert into the database.
*/
#Service
public class CacheByName<TRepo extends BaseRepository, TItem extends BaseWithName> {
private final TRepo repo;
private final Class<TItem> itemClass;
private final Map<String, TItem> itemsCache; // TODO: change to better caching strategy
#Autowired
public CacheByName(TRepo repo, Class<TItem> itemClass) {
this.repo = repo;
this.itemClass = itemClass;
itemsCache = new HashMap();
}
public TItem getCreateItem(String name) {
TItem item = null;
if(itemsCache.containsKey(name)) {
item = itemsCache.get(name);
} else {
// try and load from db
item = (TItem) repo.findByName(name);
if(item == null) {
try {
item = itemClass.newInstance();
item.setName(name);
repo.saveAndFlush(item);
} catch (InstantiationException | IllegalAccessException ex) {
// TODO: log and handle better
return null;
}
}
itemsCache.put(name, item);
}
return item;
}
}
The class BaseRepository extends JpaRepository as follows. Other actual repositories extend this one.
#NoRepositoryBean
public interface BaseRepository<T extends Object, ID extends Serializable> extends JpaRepository<T, ID> {
public T findByName(String name);
}
The class BaseWithName is a MappedSuperclass that defines a name property and getters/setters for it. Other more concrete entity classes extend this.
I am trying to inject the CacheByName class into another service like the following. Note that I am defining the actual repository and entity class as generics in the constructor:
#Service
public class DataImporter extends BaseImporter {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(PropertyImporter.class);
private final PropertyNameRepository propertyNameRepo;
private final CacheByName<DataTypeRepository, DataType> dataTypeCache;
#Autowired
public PropertyImporter(RestTemplate restTemplateD5,
CacheByName<DataTypeRepository, DataType> dataTypeCache) {
super(restTemplateD5);
this.dataTypeCache = dataTypeCache;
}
.
.
.
}
My AppConfig.java looks like the following:
#Configuration
#ComponentScan
#EnableAutoConfiguration
public class AppConfig {
#Value("${username}")
private String username;
#Value("${password}")
private String password;
#Bean
public RestTemplate restTemplateD5() {
return RestTemplateFactory.createWithHttpBasicAuth(username, password);
}
}
I haven't been able to find much information about creating beans that use generics. I suspect I need to create another #Bean definition in my AppConfig but I wasn't able to implement anything that worked.

Answer 1

As BaseRepository is also a generic type, I think you missed to add the generic type there. That should help Spring to find a proper bean to inject:
public class CacheByName<TRepo extends BaseRepository<TItem, ? extends Serializable>, TItem extends BaseWithName>
This should also make the cast no longer needed:
item = repo.findByName(name);