Best Practise of injecting applicationContext in Spring3

Question

As in the title above, I am confused about pros cons between injecting applicationContext by directly @Autowired annnotation or implementing ApplicationContextAware interfac

Answer 1

There is no need to use ApplicationContext at all.

ObjectFactory

If you need to use prototype scoped beans in a singleton bean, inject an org.springframework.beans.factory.ObjectFactory. For example using constructor injection:

@Service
class MyClass {
    private ObjectFactory myDependencyFactory;

    public MyClass(ObjectFactory prototypeFactory) {
        myDependencyFactory = prototypeFactory;
    }

}

Why

Now what's the benefit over using ApplicationContext ? You can substitute this dependency (e.g. in a test) by simply passing a lambda (since ObjectFactory is a @FunctionalInterface) that returns a stubbed version of it.

While it is possible to stub the ApplicationContext, it is not clear in that case which beans will be looked up and need to be stubbed.