Spring Boot register JAX-WS webservice as bean

Question

In my spring boot ws based application I have created a jax-ws webservice following a contract first approach. The Web service is up but I cannot autowire my other beans ins

Answer 1

Extending SpringBeanAutowiringSupport is the recommended way to get beans injected for JAX-WS endpoint class, from current spring root web application context. However this does not work with spring boot as it's a bit different on servlet context initialization.

Problem

SpringBootServletInitializer.startup() uses a custom ContextLoaderListener and does not pass the created application context to ContextLoader. Later when the object of JAX-WS endpoint class being initialized, SpringBeanAutowiringSupport depends on ContextLoader to retrieve the current application context, and always get null.

public abstract class SpringBootServletInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
        WebApplicationContext rootAppContext = createRootApplicationContext(
                servletContext);
        if (rootAppContext != null) {
            servletContext.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(rootAppContext) {
                @Override
                public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
                    // no-op because the application context is already initialized
                }
            });
        }
        ......
    }
}

Workaround

You could register a bean that implements org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.ServletContextInitializer to retrieve the application context during startup().

@Configuration
public class WebApplicationContextLocator implements ServletContextInitializer {

    private static WebApplicationContext webApplicationContext;

    public static WebApplicationContext getCurrentWebApplicationContext() {
        return webApplicationContext;
    }

    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
        webApplicationContext = WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(servletContext);
    }
}

Then you could implement self-autowiring in your JAX-WS endpoint class.

@WebService
public class ServiceImpl implements ServicePortType {

    @Autowired
    private FooBean bean;

    public ServiceImpl() {
        AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor bpp = new AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor();
        WebApplicationContext currentContext = WebApplicationContextLocator.getCurrentWebApplicationContext();
        bpp.setBeanFactory(currentContext.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory());
        bpp.processInjection(this);
    }

    // alternative constructor to facilitate unit testing.
    protected ServiceImpl(ApplicationContext context) {
        AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor bpp = new AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor();
        bpp.setBeanFactory(new DefaultListableBeanFactory(context));
        bpp.processInjection(this);
    }
}

Unit Testing

In unit tests you could get current spring application context injected, and call alternative constructor with it.

@Autowired 
private ApplicationContext context;

private ServicePortType service;

@Before
public void setup() {
    this.service = new ServiceImpl(this.context);
}