Factory for generating multiple beans

[skaffman]

I'm looking for a way to write something like a FactoryBean which can generate multiple beans for the application context. The reason for this is that I have a legacy component with its own configuration file, and this component exposes a collection of beans. I'd like to automatically register those beans with the spring application context, rather than individually fetch them from a vanilla FactoryBean.

The spring ref docs don't seem to have anything that covers this pattern. Any ideas?

[Dave Syer]

You probably would be better off implementing BeanFactoryPostProcessor than FactoryBean. A postprocessor can register new bean definitions perfectly sensibly. To register singletons (your use case) you need registerSingleton(String, Object) from DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.

[skaffman]

Ah excellent, that's a great idea

Cheers.