How to get beans created by FactoryBean spring managed?

Question

The FactoryBean can be used to programmatically create objects which might require complex instantiation logic.

However, it seems that the beans created by the FactoryBean doesn't become spring managed. Is this interpretation correct? If so, are there any nice workarounds? A short code sample is included to illustrate my problem.

ApplicationContext:

<bean id="searcher" class="some.package.SearcherFactory" /> 
<bean id="service" class="some.package.Service" /> 

Factory implementation:

public class SearcherFactory implements FactoryBean<Searcher> {

    @Override
    public Searcher getObject() throws Exception {
        return new Searcher(); // not so complex after all ;)
    }

    @Override
    public Class<Searcher> getObjectType() {
        return Searcher.class;
    }
    .... 
}

Class created by the factory:

public class Searcher() {
      private Service service;

      @Autowired
      public void setService(Service service) {
           // never invoked
           this.service=service;
      } 
}

Answer 1

Here is an abstract FactoryBean implementation that does autowiring for you:

public abstract class AbstractAutowiringFactoryBean<T> extends
    AbstractFactoryBean<T> implements ApplicationContextAware{

    private ApplicationContext applicationContext;

    @Override
    public void setApplicationContext(
        final ApplicationContext applicationContext){
        this.applicationContext = applicationContext;
    }

    @Override
    protected final T createInstance() throws Exception{
        final T instance = doCreateInstance();
        if(instance != null){
            applicationContext
              .getAutowireCapableBeanFactory()
              .autowireBean(instance);
        }
        return instance;
    }

    /**
     * Create the bean instance.
     * 
     * @see #createInstance()
     */
    protected abstract T doCreateInstance();

}

Extend it, implement the getObjectType() and doCreateInstance() methods and you're up and running with autowiring.

Note: BeanPostProcessors are not applied, that would require additional code.