I've had a similar requirement: I needed to inject a Spring-managed repository bean into my Person entity class ("entity" as in "something with an identity", for example an JPA entity). A Person instance has friends, and for this Person instance to return its friends, it shall delegate to its repository and query for friends there.
@Entity
public class Person {
private static PersonRepository personRepository;
@Id
@GeneratedValue
private long id;
public static void setPersonRepository(PersonRepository personRepository){
this.personRepository = personRepository;
}
public Set<Person> getFriends(){
return personRepository.getFriends(id);
}
...
}
.
@Repository
public class PersonRepository {
public Person get Person(long id) {
// do database-related stuff
}
public Set<Person> getFriends(long id) {
// do database-related stuff
}
...
}
So how did I inject that PersonRepository singleton into the static field of the Person class?
I created a @Configuration, which gets picked up at Spring ApplicationContext construction time. This @Configuration gets injected with all those beans that I need to inject as static fields into other classes. Then with a @PostConstruct annotation, I catch a hook to do all static field injection logic.
@Configuration
public class StaticFieldInjectionConfiguration {
@Inject
private PersonRepository personRepository;
@PostConstruct
private void init() {
Person.setPersonRepository(personRepository);
}
}