Adding a Pre-constructed Bean to a Spring Application Context

Question

I am writing a class that implements the following method:

public void run(javax.sql.DataSource dataSource);

Within this method, I wish to

Answer 1

I discovered two Spring interfaces can be used to implement what I need. The BeanNameAware interface allows Spring to tell an object its name within an application context by calling the setBeanName(String) method. The FactoryBean interface tells Spring to not use the object itself, but rather the object returned when the getObject() method is invoked. Put them together and you get:

public class PlaceholderBean implements BeanNameAware, FactoryBean {

    public static Map beansByName = new HashMap();

    private String beanName;

    @Override
    public void setBeanName(String beanName) {
        this.beanName = beanName;
    }

    @Override
    public Object getObject() {
        return beansByName.get(beanName);
    }

    @Override
    public Class getObjectType() {
        return beansByName.get(beanName).getClass();
    }

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

}

The bean definition is now reduced to:

The placeholder receives its value before creating the application context.

public void run(DataSource externalDataSource) {
    PlaceholderBean.beansByName.put("dataSource", externalDataSource);
    ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");
    assert externalDataSource == context.getBean("dataSource");
}

Things appear to be working successfully!