How to make Spring accept fluent (non-void) setters?

java spring reflection introspection fluent-interface
Chris picture Chris · May 25, 2010 · Viewed 7k times · Source

I have an API which I am turning into an internal DSL. As such, most methods in my PoJos return a reference to this so that I can chain methods together declaratively as such (syntactic sugar).

myComponent
    .setID("MyId")
    .setProperty("One")
    .setProperty2("Two")
    .setAssociation(anotherComponent)
    .execute();

My API does not depend on Spring but I wish to make it 'Spring-Friendly' by being PoJo friendly with zero argument constructors, getters and setters. The problem is that Spring seems to not detect my setter methods when I have a non-void return type.

The return type of this is very convenient when chaining together my commands so I don't want to destroy my programmatic API just be to compatible with Spring injection.

Is there a setting in Spring to allow me to use non-void setters?

Chris

Answer

Stephen C picture Stephen C · May 25, 2010

Is there a setting in Spring to allow me to use non-void setters?

The simple answer is No - there is no such setting.

Spring is designed to be compatible with the JavaBeans spec, and that requires the setters to return void.

For a discussion, refer to this Spring Forums thread. There are possible ways around this limitation mentioned in the forum, but there is no simple solution, and I don't think anyone actually reported that they had tried this and that it worked.

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