DDevelopment & Design

Spring autowire with qualifiers

Introduction

Autowired is great annotation, which by default inject beans by type to annotated element (constructor, setter or field). But how to use it, when there is more than one bean of requested type.

Autowired with one bean

Suppose we will work with small interface:

interface IHeaderPrinter {
    String printHeader(String header)
}

When we have only one bean implementing IHeaderPrinter:

@Component
class HtmlHeaderPrinter implements IHeaderPrinter{
    @Override
    String printHeader(String header) {
        return "<h1>$header</h1>"
    }
}

then everything works great and test passes.

@Autowired
IHeaderPrinter headerPrinter

@Test
void shouldPrintHtmlHeader() {
    assert headerPrinter.printHeader('myTitle') == '<h1>myTitle</h1>'
}

Two implementations

But what will happen, if we add another implementation of IHeaderPrinter, e. g. MarkdownHeaderPrinter?

@Component
class MarkdownHeaderPrinter implements IHeaderPrinter {
    @Override
    String printHeader(String header) {
        return "# $header"
    }
}

Now out test with fail with exception:

Error creating bean with name 'com.blogspot.przybyszd.spring.autowire.SpringAutowireWithQualifiersApplicationTests': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Could not autowire field: private com.blogspot.przybyszd.spring.autowire.IHeaderPrinter com.blogspot.przybyszd.spring.autowire.SpringAutowireWithQualifiersApplicationTests.headerPrinter; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException: No qualifying bean of type [com.blogspot.przybyszd.spring.autowire.IHeaderPrinter] is defined: expected single matching bean but found 2: markdownHeaderPrinter,htmlHeaderPrinter

We have to decide which implementation we want to use in our test, so …

Two implementations with Qualifier

Each bean is registered with name equal its class. For example HtmlHeaderPrinter is named htmlHeaderPrinter. The name is also its qualifier. We have to tell Autowired, that it should inject htmlHeaderPrinter:

@Autowired
@Qualifier('htmlHeaderPrinter')
IHeaderPrinter headerPrinter

Now our test passes again.

Two implementations qualified by field name

If field is names like implementing class (for example htmlHeaderPrinter), then this class implementation will be injected:

@Autowired
IHeaderPrinter htmlHeaderPrinter

And test passes:

@Test
void shouldPrintHtmlHeader() {
    assert htmlHeaderPrinter.printHeader('myTitle') == '<h1>myTitle</h1>'
}

Thanks to @marcinjasion.

Two implementation with Primary

We often have one implementation which we almost always want to inject, so do we still have to put Qualifier with its name wherever we want to use it? No.

We could mark one implementation as Primary and this bean will be wired by default (unless we explicit give another Qualifier to use injection point):

@Component
@Primary
class HtmlHeaderPrinter implements IHeaderPrinter{
    // ...
}
@Autowired
IHeaderPrinter headerPrinter

Summary

Autowired annotation allows us to inject dependencies to beans. It works great without additional configuration, when each bean could be uniquely find by type. When we have more than one bean, that could be injected, we have to use Qualifier or Primary annotation to help it find desired implementation.

Source code is available here.

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DDevelopment & Design

Log4j and MDC in Grails

Log4j provides very useful feature: MDC - mapped diagnostic context. It can be used to store data in context of current thread. It may sound scary a bit but idea is simple.

My post is based on post http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/?p=521 from Burt Beckwith's excellent blog, it's definitely worth checking if you are interested in Grails.

Short background story...


Suppose we want to do logging our brand new shopping system and we want to have in each log customer's shopping basket number. And our system can be used at once by many users who can perform many transactions, actions like adding items and so on. How can we achieve that? Of course we can add basket number in every place where we do some logging but this task would be boring and error-prone. 

Instead of this we can use MDC to store variable with basket number in map. 

In fact MDC can be treated as map of custom values for current thread that can be used by logger. 


How to do that with Grails?


Using MDC with Grails is quite simple. All we need to do is to create our own custom filter which works for given urls and puts our data in MDC.

Filters in Grails are classes in directory grails-app/conf/* which names end with *Filters.groovy postfix. We can create this class manually or use Grails command: 
grails create-filters info.rnowak.App.Basket

In result class named BasketFilters will be created in grails-app/conf/info/rnowak/UberApp.

Initially filter class looks a little bit empty:
class BasketFilters {
    def filters = {
        all(controller:'*', action:'*') {
            before = {

            }
            after = { Map model ->

            }
            afterView = { Exception e ->

            }
        }
    }
}
All we need to do is fill empty closures, modify filter properties and put some data into MDC.

all is the general name of our filter, as class BasketFilters (plural!) can contain many various filters. You can name it whatever you want, for this post let assume it will be named basketFilter. 

Another thing is change of filter parameters. According to official documentation (link) we can customize our filter in many ways. You can specify controller to be filtered, its actions, filtered urls and so on. In our example you can stay with default option where filter is applied to every action of every controller. If you are interested in filtering only some urls, use uri parameter with expression describing desired urls to be filtered.

Three closures that are already defined in template have their function and they are started in these conditions:

  • before - as name says, it is executed before filtered action takes place
  • after - similarly, it is called after the action
  • afterView - called after rendering of the actions view
Ok, so now we know what are these mysterious methods and when they are called. But what can be done within them? In official Grails docs (link again) under section 7.6.3 there is a list of properties that are available to use in filter.

With that knowledge, we can proceed to implementing filter.

Putting something into MDC in filter


What we want to do is quite easy: we want to retrieve basket number from parameters and put it into MDC in our filter:
class BasketFilters {
    def filters = {
        basketFilter(controller:'*', action:'*') {
            before = {
                MDC.put("basketNumber", params.basketNumber ?: "")
            }
            after = { Map model ->
                MDC.remove("basketNumber")
            }
        }
    }
}

We retrieve basket number from Grails params map and then we put in map under specified key ("basketNumber" in this case), which will be later used in logger conversion pattern. It is important to remove custom value after processing of action to avoid leaks.

So we are putting something into MDC. But how make use of it in logs?


We can refer to custom data in MDC in conversion patter using syntax: %X{key}, where key is our key we used in filter to put data, like:
def conversionPattern = "%d{yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} %-5p %t [%c{1}] %X{basketNumber} - %m%n"


And that's it :) We've put custom data in log4j MDC and successfully used it in logs to display interesting values.