Autowiring session-scoped bean

[mark_m]

I'm having difficulties with a new session-scoped bean I've created, userPreferences. I get the following lengthy exception when I try to autowire it one of my Controllers:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationExce ption: Error creating bean with name 'welcomeController': Autowiring of fields failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationExce ption: Could not autowire field: com.foo.web.UserPreferences com.foo.web.WelcomeController.userPreferences; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationExce ption: Error creating bean with name 'userPreferences': Scope 'session' is not active for the current thread; consider defining a scoped proxy for this bean if you intend to refer to it from a singleton; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.

I've defined the userPreferences bean as follows:

@Component
@Scope("session")
public class UserPreferences {
  ...
}

And I autowired it into my Controller as follows

@Controller
public class WelcomeController {

   @Autowired
   UserPreferences userPreferences;

}

I configured my dispatcherServlet.xml with the following to recognize annotations:

<context:annotation-config />
<context:component-scan base-package="com.foo.web"/>

Any ideas what I'm missing?