Autowired not working properly (Doesn't crash on multiple beans definition)

[lumino6]

Hello,

I have a weird question, which is the opposite of pretty much all the questions I saw on here :P

Basically, I have an interface

public interface Manager {
    Object create();
}

with a subinterface

public interface SubManager {
    Object delete();
}

The main interface is implemented 3 times by different classes in this way

public class MainManager implements SubManager {
    public Object create() { ... }
    public Object deleted() { ... }
}

public class SecondManager implements Manager {
    public Object create() { ... }
}

public class ThirdManager implements Manager {
    public Object create() { ... }
}

All of the config is defined in XML (no annotations yet anywhere in those classes)

<bean id="mainManager" class = "com.manager.impl.MainManager">
<bean id="secondManager" class = "com.manager.impl.SecondManager">
<bean id="thirdManager" class = "com.manager.impl.ThirdManager">

Then I created a new class

public DoSomething {
    @Autowired private Manager manager;

    ...
}

And ... everything works fine, it gets the mainManager like it's supposed to, but

My question is : Why the hell does this work?

Everywhere I've read, Spring says that if there is more than 1 bean defined, there will be an exception, every search I do on Google tells me the same

Why is spring taking my first bean into account and ignoring the rest?

PS: There is no primary bean defined in any case, not in XML nor in Spring annotations
PS 2 : I've defined a second bean with @Resource(name="secondManager") to see if, maybe, it didn't load my beans correctly, but that bean works too, so it turns out all my managers are loaded :|
PS 3 : I'm using Spring v3.2




I know the fix to this (@Resource), but the fact that it doesn't follow the behavior it's supposed to scares me a lil bit

[tannoy]

From the code you posted, the MainManager, SecondManager and ThirdManager did *not* actually inherit your AbstractManager. Is this your typo? or it is the real code you were testing?

[lumino6]

Big typo, I didn't understand that class correctly at first ...

Fixed my first post

[lumino6]

For those interested, I figured out my problem

@Autowired tries to wire both by type and by name
If it finds multiple beans of the same type, it will act like @Resource and try to find a bean with the same id as the name of the property

In my case, my property was called contractManager, and my 3 beans were "contractManager", "contractOrderManager", "contractProposalManager"

After finding these 3 beans, before crashing, it tried matching the name, and since we had a match, it took the match and didn't crash as expected

I haven't figured out how to force @Autowired to ignore names yet, and try to match only by type (argument autowire=BY_TYPE on @Bean doesn't work ...)