Completely confused: Weird behavior with spring 3.0.5 Autowiring

Question

i've been banging my head all day long with a very simple autowiring issue. Sorry in advance about posting about this very simplistic issue. I'm running a web application with Spring 3.0.5 with MVC where the servlet context is my-servlet.xml separated from the application config webapp-config.xml which have all the hibernate stuffs.

Basically what I am trying to do is to wire wurfl manager to a custom sitemesh Decorator. this is not related to sitemesh or wurfl am just given as much info as possible. here is the snippet of the part:

public class MDecoratorMapper extends ConfigDecoratorMapper{
private String decoratorName = null;
@Autowired
WURFLManager wurflManager; // does not work, object is null
private Properties prop;
.........
}

my application config webapp-config.xml is like so :

 <import resource="classpath:META-INF/model-config.xml"/>
<import resource="webapp-security.xml"/>
<import resource="wurfl.xml" />
<aop:aspectj-autoproxy proxy-target-class="true"/><!-- this is needed by apache shiro in spring-->

<context:component-scan base-package="com.bla.bla.web.controller.admin"/>
<context:component-scan base-package="com.bla.bla.web.controller.exception"/>

<bean id="propertyConfigurer"
      class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="locations">
        <list>
            <value>classpath:m.properties</value>
            <value>classpath:m.log4j.properties</value>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

Now take for example in webapp-security.xml there is this hibernateRealm class wired as such :

<bean id="hibernateRealm" class="com.bla.bla.web.security.HibernateRealm">
    <constructor-arg  ref="credMatcher"/>
</bean>

its code is here :

public class HibernateRealm extends AuthorizingRealm {

Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(HibernateRealm.class);

@Autowired
UserAccountService uAS; // this works no problem
@Autowired
RoleService roleService; // this also works
//.....
}

the autowiring in this case works perfectly, never have any problem with it.

Now let's take this context file : wurfl.xml it has click here to see

 <bean id="mDecoratorMapper" class="com.bla.bla.web.decoratormapper.MDecoratorMapper">
    <!--<property name="wurflManager" ref="wurfl.manager"/>-->
</bean>

its code is here :

public class MDecoratorMapper extends ConfigDecoratorMapper{
private String decoratorName = null;
@Autowired
WURFLManager wurflManager; <!--this always return null-->
private Properties prop;

public void init(Config config, Properties properties, DecoratorMapper parent) throws InstantiationException {
    super.init(config, properties, parent);
    this.prop = properties;
//decoratorName = properties.getProperty("decorator.name", "mobile");
// ....
}

It's all become weird to me.so i decided to autowire it inside a Controller. and it wasn't null.I really don't have any explanation for this .i even used as you can see the commented property , that i've also use property wiring.

I don't get it ,and am locked right now staring at my timeline. I would be really grateful if someone give a hand. Thanks for reading this

EDIT :

to add to my astonishment i've switched back to the default ConigDecoratorMapper to get the site going and added the WURFLManager to a MVC controller :

@Controller(value = "useraccesscontroller")

//@RequestMapping("/site/authentication") public class UserAccessController {

private static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(UserAccessController.class);

@Autowired
UserAccountService userAccountService;
@Autowired
VerificationService verificationService;
@Autowired
EmailSender emailSender;
@Autowired
EmailTemplateService emailTemplateService;

@Autowired
Map<String, String> facebookAPI;
@Resource
@Qualifier(value = "roleLandingPage")
Map<String, String> roleLandingPage;
@Resource
@Qualifier(value = "usefulUrls")
Map<String, String> usefulUrls;
@Autowired
private WURFLManager wurflManager;


public UserAccessController(){

}


@RequestMapping(value = "/site/authentication/signup/form")
public ModelAndView showAccountRequestForm(HttpServletRequest request){
    net.sourceforge.wurfl.core.Device device = wurflManager.getDeviceForRequest(request);
    SignupForm form = new SignupForm();
    ModelMap map = new ModelMap();
    map.addAttribute("signupForm",form);
    map.addAttribute("message","");

    return new ModelAndView("signup",map);

}

I can attest that this autowiring inside the UserAccessController works and during debugging i tested with User-Agent Switcher for Chrome and it's picking the device.so why not in my Decorator :(

Answer 1

Try making your wurfl.manager as autowired candidate

<bean id="wurfl.manager" class="net.sourceforge.wurfl.spring.SpringWurflManager" autowire-candidate="true">
     <property name="wurflModel" ref="wurfl.model" />
</bean>

Also, notice that net.sourceforge.wurfl.spring packake is not being scanned by Spring according with your configuration

Updated:

<context:component-scan base-package="net.sourceforge.wurfl.*"/>

Answer 2

You don't show how your custom MDecoratorMapper is used. I haven't used SiteMesh in a very long time, but I expect that a ConfigDecoratorMapper is a Sitemesh class whose lifecycle is controlled by SiteMesh, not by Spring. Therefore, why do you expect it to get an injected instance? How are you telling SiteMesh to use the MDecoratorMapper? It's only going to get one that's been injected if it's going to Spring to get it (or if you're using AspectJ bytecode weaving).