@Autowire by name?

I was wondering if someone here would be kind enough to clear up my confusion about auto wiring.

What I'd like to do is specify the fields I want to auto wire with @Autowired, but have them wired by name, rather than type, or @Qualifier("bla").

Looking at the Spring code, it seems that something like this is possible:

Code:

---

@Configurable(autowire=Autowire.BY_TYPE)
public class MyClass() { ... }

---

but I don't understand how to invoke the processing of @Configurable annotations. It seems that I somehow need to utilize the BeanConfigurerSupport class, but it's not obvious to me how to do that. The comments say something about AspectJ integration?

I tried setting the AUTOWIRE_BY_NAME mode on the BeanDefinition directly with a MergedBeanDefinitionPostProcessor, but this mechanism seems to not actually look at the @Autowired annotations, but rather just goes after all PropertyDescriptors on the bean.

So, is it possible to do what I'm trying to do?

That auto wire has nothing to do with @Autowired (confusing I know) it is the replacement for the auto wire xml attribute which basically scans getters/setters to do auto wiring.

So in short what you are trying to do isn't possible out-of-the-box. If you would want that you would need to reimplement/override the functionality of the AutowireAnnotationBeanFactoryPostProcessor next to not using context:annotation-driven or component-scan elements anymore (you would need to register all Bean(Factory)PostProcessors by hand instead of relying on the defaults).