Intentionally setting a Spring bean to null

Question

I\'m using Spring to inject JMS connection factory into my Java application. Since this factory is only required within the production environment, not while I\'m developing

Answer 1

Some noted above, axtact's answer doesn't work in Autowiring contextes, where Spring will rely on correct information from the getObjectType() method. So you might end up with errors like:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No matching bean of type [xxxxxxxxxxxxx] found for dependency: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. Dependency annotations: {@org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired(required=true), @org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier(value=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy)}
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.raiseNoSuchBeanDefinitionException(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:920)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.doResolveDependency(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:789)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.resolveDependency(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:703)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor$AutowiredFieldElement.inject(AutowiredAnnotatio

So here's a small variation which involves allowing users to force the objectype at construction. Using a property instead of a constructor-arg didn't work because Spring doesn't fully initialize the beans in this context.

public class NullFactoryBean implements FactoryBean {
    private final Class objectType;

    public NullFactoryBean(Class objectType) {
        this.objectType = objectType;
    }

    @Override
    public Object getObject() throws Exception {
        return null;
    }

    @Override
    public Class getObjectType() {
        return objectType;
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isSingleton() {
        return false;
    }
}