spring - Bean injection inside a JPA @Entity

Question

Is it possible to inject beans to a JPA @Entity using Spring's dependency injection?

I attempted to @Autowire ServletContext but, while the server did start successfully, I received a NullPointerException when trying to access the bean property.

@Autowired
@Transient
ServletContext servletContext;

Answer 1

You can inject dependencies into objects not managed by the Spring container using @Configurable as explained here: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/aop.html#aop-atconfigurable.

As you've realized by now, unless using the @Configurable and appropriate AspectJ weaving configuration, Spring does not inject dependencies into objects created using the new operator. In fact, it doesn't inject dependencies into objects unless you've retrieved them from the ApplicationContext, for the simple reason that it simply doesn't know about their existence. Even if you annotate your entity with @Component, instantiation of that entity will still be performed by a new operation, either by you or a framework such as Hibernate. Remember, annotations are just metadata: if no one interprets that metadata, it does not add any behaviour or have any impact on a running program.

All that being said, I strongly advise against injecting a ServletContext into an entity. Entities are part of your domain model and should be decoupled from any delivery mechanism, such as a Servlet-based web delivery layer. How will you use that entity when it's accessed by a command-line client or something else not involving a ServletContext? You should extract the necessary data from that ServletContext and pass it through traditional method arguments to your entity. You will achieve a much better design through this approach.