Are you in a situation where @Autowired will not work? for example, in a static class or a class that is istantiated by another framework (hibernate) and so on. The latter case is my case: I had to autowire a bean in a Sequence Generator (to create ID for my classes), but since the class was instantiated by Hibernate, Spring could not access and autowire it, even if it was declared as a bean.

However, there is a chance to get what you want. In my example we will try to autowire "myBean" object. Please ensure that your bean is declared somewhere in your applicationContext.xml 😉

1. First of all, the class that can't be Spring-ified must implement ApplicationContextAware interface :

<pre class="lang:java mark:2,4 decode:true">public class SequenceTableIdGenerator implements IdentifierGenerator, ApplicationContextAware {

private static ApplicationContext applicationContext;

private MyBean myBean;

...

}</pre>

2. you must override the method setApplicationContext that comes with the above interface :

<pre class="lang:java decode:true">@Override public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext applicationContext) throws BeansException { this.applicationContext = applicationContext; }</pre>

3. Finally, you can autowire your beans in a constructor or in any other method:

<pre class="lang:java mark:2 decode:true">if (myBean == null) { myBean = (MyBean) applicationContext.getBean("myBean"); }</pre>

That's it! This method is not standard but it's very useful. Every time I needed it I had to go searching the web. Now this useful piece of info is my website 🙂