Why is Spring's ApplicationContext.getBean considered bad?

Question

I asked a general Spring question: Auto-cast Spring Beans and had multiple people respond that calling Spring\'s ApplicationContext.getBean() should be avoided

Answer 1

It's true that including the class in application-context.xml avoids the need to use getBean. However, even that is actually unnecessary. If you are writing a standalone application and you DON'T want to include your driver class in application-context.xml, you can use the following code to have Spring autowire the driver's dependencies:

public class AutowireThisDriver {

    private MySpringBean mySpringBean;    

    public static void main(String[] args) {
       AutowireThisDriver atd = new AutowireThisDriver(); //get instance

       ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
                  "/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml"); //get Spring context 

       //the magic: auto-wire the instance with all its dependencies:
       ctx.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().autowireBeanProperties(atd,
                  AutowireCapableBeanFactory.AUTOWIRE_BY_TYPE, true);        

       // code that uses mySpringBean ...
       mySpringBean.doStuff() // no need to instantiate - thanks to Spring
    }

    public void setMySpringBean(MySpringBean bean) {
       this.mySpringBean = bean;    
    }
}

I've needed to do this a couple of times when I have some sort of standalone class that needs to use some aspect of my app (eg for testing) but I don't want to include it in application-context because it is not actually part of the app. Note also that this avoids the need to look up the bean using a String name, which I've always thought was ugly.