Is there an easy way to autowire empty collection if no beans present in Spring?

Question

If I have @Autowired List beans; and no beans of SomeBeanClass, I get:

No matching bean of type [SomeBe

Answer 1

If I add (required=false), I get null for beans.

Does the field get explicitly set to null or does it simply not get set at all? Try adding an initializer expression

@Autowired List beans = new ArrayList<>();