Spring provides a range of annotations with names starting with?Enable*, these annotations in essence enable certain Spring managed features to be activated. One good example of such an annotation is?EnableWebMvcwhich brings in all the beans needed to support a MVC flow in Spring based applications. Another good example is the?EnableAsync?annotation to activate beans to support async functionality in Spring based applications.
I was curious about how such annotations work and wanted to document my understanding. The way these annotations are supported can be considered part of the SPI and so may break if the internal implementation changes in future.
Simple Enable* Annotations
One way to think about these custom annotations is that they add a set of new beans into the Spring’s application context. Let us start by defining one such custom annotation:
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@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
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@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
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@interface?EnableSomeBeans {}
and apply this annotation on a Spring @Configuration class:
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@Configuration
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@EnableSomeBeans
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public?static?class?SpringConfig {}
So now to bring in a set of beans when this annotation is applied is as simple as adding the set of beans to bring in using @Import annotation this way:
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@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
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@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
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@Import(SomeBeanConfiguration.class)
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@interface?EnableSomeBeans {}
That is essentially it, if this imported @Configuration class defines any beans, they would now be part of the Application context:
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@Configuration
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class?SomeBeanConfiguration {
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?
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????@Bean
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????public?String aBean1() {
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????????return?"aBean1";
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????}
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?
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????@Bean
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????public?String aBean2() {
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????????return?"aBean2";
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????}
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}
Here is a?gist?with a working sample.
Enable* Annotations with Selectors
Enable annotations can be far more complex though, they can activate a different family of beans based on the context around them. An example of such an annotation is?EnableCaching?which activates configuration based on different caching implementations available in the classpath.
Writing such Enable* annotations is a little more involved than the simpler example earlier. As before start with a custom annotation:
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@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
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@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
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@Import(SomeBeanConfigurationSelector.class)
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public?@interface?EnableSomeBeansSelector {
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????String criteria()?default?"default";
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}
Note that in this case the custom annotation has a sample field called criteria, what I want to do is to activate two different set of beans based on this criteria. This can be achieved using a @Configuration selector which can return different @Configuration file based on the context(in this instance the value of the criteria field). This selector has a simple signature and this is a sample implementation:
So if the criteria field is “default”, the beans in “SomeBeanConfigurationDefault” gets added in, else the one in “SomeBeanConfigurationType1”
Here is a?gist?with a working sample.
Conclusion
I hope this gives an appreciation for how Spring internally implements the @Enable* annotations, as an application developer you may not need to create such annotations yourself, a simpler mechanism will be to use @Configuration classes and Spring bean profiles to compose applications.
