Spring - changing property value based on container bean - spring

This is more of a design question. My project's structure is like this - I have a dozen frontend classes, some service layer classes and a single backend class which contacts an external system. I use spring to initialize and inject the backend class instance into the service class beans, and in turn the service class beans into the frontend class beans (as appropriate).
The frontend classes are (logically) divided into modules. The service layer and backend are common.
Now, my requirement is that the backend class methods need to send out a different value for a field to the external system, based on the module of the frontend class making the call.
To make it more simple, consider a (somewhat crude) usecase where the backend class connects to a DB for each method call. DB calls originated by module A's frontend classes, must always connect with the username "moduleA". Similarly all calls from module B must result in connections using username "moduleB". Note, the behavior itself is common regardless of caller -- just the username must be different.
Most trivial way is to let each frontend class bean have its own copy of service layer class bean, which in turn has its own copy of backend class bean. For eg, module A's frontend beans will refer to the moduleA service bean, which will refer to moduleA backend bean. I can inject module A's username into module A's backend bean in this case. Similarly there will be a set of bean definitions (frontend + service + backend) for moduleB.
But I don't want to create so many bean definitions. The other trivial way is to pass the value from frontend all the way to backend in all methods. But this is a widespread change. Is there a simpler way using Spring?

You should try passing the values using thread local (if your modules are running inside the same JVM)
Be careful to clean the thread in a servlet filter via a finally method.

Related

Standard Scope for Spring classes

In a spring MVC app , by default all beans are singleton ,but what should be the standard scopes for below classes according to good programming practices:
1.DAO classes
2.Controller classes
3.DTO classes
4.Service classes
I have read that DAO and Controller classes should be singleton scoped and DTO classes should not be beans so not annotated, whenever required, DTO classes should be instantiated using "new".
What will be the scope of #Service classes ?
And Which classes will have the Request and Session scopes if none of the above classes are created in these 2 scopes?
First of all not classes, but Spring managed beans have a scope. Difference is that you can have classes in your application that you didn't configure to be managed by Spring (So for example you didn't provide #Component annotation)
For the Spring managed beans default scope is Singleton. That means Spring container will provide the same instance everytime you ask for that bean to be autowired.
You can change that default scope with for example #Scopeannotation. So to answer your question, all of the above mentioned choices would have default scope of singleton but you could changed that to be requestor sessionscope if you would like (only applicable in web applications though). You can read more about setting scopes here.
ps. DTO classes are usually not declared to be managed by Spring - letting Spring manage a simple data transfer object doesn't make much sense.
So basically two things to consider here. The 1st is that if a bean is required to be declared as a spring bean . It depends on if you need to use the spring features for this class such as #Transactional , #Async , #PreAuthorize , #Autowired (i.e dependency injection) , or ensure the bean has certain scope etc. If not , it is simpler not define it as a spring bean and simply create it by yourself.
So the following types of the classes are required to define them as spring bean in most cases:
DAO because most probably need to inject EntityManager or JdbcTemplate to it
Controller because it is a part of spring-mvc and you need to define it as a bean such that you can use #RequestMapping / #GetMapping / #PostMapping / #PutMapping / #DeletMapping / #PatchMapping etc. on its method.
Service class because you need to inject it into the controller and you need to use #Transactional to manage the DB transaction for its method.
For DTO , in most case you can create it by yourself since it is just a data container in nature and does not require to use any spring features.
The 2nd thing to consider is what scope does a bean should be. You mainly need to think about if an instance of that class is okay to be executed safely by multiple request (i.e thread) concurrently. If yes , you can simply use the default singleton scope. If not , you can think about if you want each HTTP request (i.e #RequestScope) or each HTTP session (i.e. #SessionScope) has their own instance of that class to work with. For example , if you are implementing some shopping cart , you most probably want that the HTTP session has their won instance of a shopping cart and so you should use #SessionScope for the shopping cart.

Spring-Boot: share an object between components

I have a custom object which I like to share between different Spring-Boot components (e.g. WebHandler, Authenticator, Filter).
Maybe the easiest way is a static object in the main-class but thats not very elegant.
Whats the most common way to do it?
The whole point of spring as a container is to manage your objects.
Now statics do not have a well defined lifecycle ( when exactly this object gets created, who disposes it when the application gets closed, etc)
Speing answers all these questions by using thecdependency injection techniques. If you're already using spring then you should define this 'shared object' as a spring bean (by default it will have scope singleton just like static object that you've proposed but managed by spring container which is better - it will manage the lifecycle of the object by itself)
Then given the classes that must be dependent of the object are beans by themselves you can inject that bean:
class MySharedObject {}
class MyWebHandler implementsWebHandler {
private final MySharedObject mySharedObject;
public MyWebHandler(MySharedObject mySharedObject) {
this.mySharedObject = mySharedObject;
In addition to the lifecycle management this way allows easy unit testing of classes that use the shared object (like 'MyWebHandler' in this case) - now uou can create a stub/mock of the shared object and pass it into the handler - something that cannot really be easily done when using statics
So in summary if you can use spring and define it as a bean - by all means do so, the usage of statics is discouraged if you already have a dependency injection container
If you have shared object first of all it should not contain any state as differents components can change it and also it should be thread safe.
It is fine to reuse it across all components via #Autowired annotation but you need to be sure that it is threadsafe. Spring bean scope singleton is not thread safe out of box it dependes how you write the code.
You can use as static method but it dependes on logic which you have and if those component has an dependency on another objects and if they need to in spring IOC.

Selecting the right candidates for spring bean. What to what not to

Last year when I started learning spring I remember an article that expalined that not all pojos are to be defined as beans. So I'm planning to create a web app say EmployeeMaintenance. CRUD Functionalities are there. I will surely end up creating pojos like Employee , EmployeeSupplementaryDetails, Address etc. Should I makes these beans and configure them in xml or annotate whatever. I'm sure my understanding of bean is not enough. I know that Dbconn , services etc should definitely be declared as bean.
All I need is what are the parameters I should consider before I make a pojo a Spring Bean.
General rule for making Java class a Spring bean is to ask yourself if you need to inject object into some other object or if you want the object to be managed by Spring components. The classes you listed as example doesn't seem to be good candidates for being Spring beans - they represent model data and will be passed as some service's methods parameters.
Examples of typical CRUD application beans:
EmployeeService (you would want to inject it to controller or other service)
EmployeeRepository / EmployeeDao
EmployeeController (it will be bean managed by Spring's MVC framework)
etc.
Spring beans are building blocks of your application. Let's suppose you need to create web application for storing and managing employees records (creating, retrieving, updating, deleting). What you will need is web controller that will handle incoming requests for several operations (EmployeeController). Good practice is that controller doesn't implement any business logic - all it should do is to delegate work to service beans. So you would need bean like EmployeeService. Then controller would ask service to do some work (give me employees list / remove John Smith from database / change salary for Ann Jackson / etc). So service will be controller's dependency (service is injected into controller). Service can also have some dependencies (like repository object, which is responsible for handling communication with data storage) and these dependencies would be injected to service. Dependency management is Spring's core feature.
Good practice in object oriented programming is to have small classes that are responsible for doing one kind of actions. Such objects are much easier to test and understand. The more classes you have, the building application from blocks is harder, so it's worth to delegate it to framework like Spring. Without Spring you would need to create controller class, then inside of it create service, then inside of it create other dependencies and so on. Spring does it for you, so all you need to do is to declare dependencies and they will be injected automatically. If you want to replace implementation of your service with another (for example repository that used XML file for storing data with repository storing data in relational database) then you just have to change your bean definition.
Regarding to beans managed by Spring, typical example is database transaction manager (eg. org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager). If you define such bean, and declare which methods should be transactional, then Spring will take care of transactions management (will open, commit or rollback transactions automatically).

Spring injection and object instantiation

I am trying to better understand Spring instantiation of beans. To illustrate my doubts, let's assume we have a Service class being wired in a Controller, here are the questions:
How will Spring manage the lifecycle
of the Controller? Will a new object
be created per request?
Once a Service is instantiaded and
wired to a Controller, will Spring
re-use that object reference to wire
it in to other beans?
Like Servlets, Controllers' lifecycle spans beyond requests. All of controllers in the application are instantiated only once when application is started; afterwards those objects are re-used to service all requests.
As Bozho pointed out, by default all beans are in singleton scope, therefore they will be re-used everywhere, unless specified otherwise.
The default scope is singleton, which means beans will be re-used (i.e. 1) no, a new object will not be created per request, and 2) yes, the object reference will be reused).
This can all be configured. Have a look at http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/spring-framework-reference/html/beans.html#beans-factory-scopes.
It all depends on the bean scope. By default all beans are in singleton scope - that is, they are instantiated by the container only once.
If you specify #Scope("request") (or the xml equivalent) then the same service object (singleton) will be injected in all instances of the request-scoped controller. (But you rarely need request-scoped controllers)

Calling remote EJB3 without interface classes available

When calling remote EJB3 (Glassfish) from another EJB module, it is usual to have interfaces available, they are included as JAR file so that when you do JNDI lookup everything works as expected.
I have a situation where EJB3 JNDI name is determined at runtime, and my attempts to access the EJBs retrieved from JNDI in usual way fail, container complains ClassNotFound for remote interface classes. This is odd to me, since all the interface classes extend a parent interface for which I DO have a dependency in my calling EJB module, i.e.:
IParent ejbRef = (IParent) JndiLocator.getObject("jndinameRemote");
Is this possible with EJB3, without the need to have an exact remote EJB interface bytecode available in my JAR?
Bozo
Even though i am exactly not sure what the above setup is , I had a similar need of trying to invoke EJB when the client jars are not known during the compile time, infact in addition there is also no way for me to know what Application service is the EJB deployed at.
I had managed to do this by writing my Customized Class Loader , the catch here is that the Class which in turn tries to invoke the EJB must be itself loaded using the Customized class loader along with all the necessary jars i.e client jar with interfaces and models and the application server specific client jar.
I passed all the context properties as an input to my Invoker class to initialize context factory and invoke the bean.
These are high level steps to achieve this
Create Class EJBInvoker with method invokeEJB, you can pass it couple of Maps with properties for preparing context and Ejb interface , method , parameters classes , values and output class.
Use reflection to create instance of InitialContextFactory as well as Bean object , parameters and method invokation.
Add the above class to separate jar file and invoke the method with properties required from external project using a customized class loader.

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