@Autowired HttpServletResponse
I'm looking for a way to autowire HttpServletResponse. It doesn't work with spring out of the box, but I've found this description. This works but is sort of annoying, in that spring obviously has a mechanism to make objects request scoped (i.e. HttpServletRequest) and this seems to be a hack bolted on top.
Is there a way to hook into the same mechanism that spring uses for HttpServletRequest? And, any idea why spring team decided to only make HttpServletRequest autowire capable (and excluded HttpServletResponse)?
Answer
Perhaps there is some workaround, but it's not that obvious, because it's not the way it's meant to be. Spring MVC is meant to have singleton @Controller beans that provide @RequestMapping methods which take the request and response as arguments.
If you need the response in another place (the service layer) - don't do it. The response should not go beyond the web (controller) layer.
To inject the response, you need:
- to store the response in a ThreadLocal
- to make a factory bean that returns the current response
About the example code you showed - I'm not sure if you are not going to need the factory bean to return a proxy (implementing HttpServletResponse), which in turn to return the current response. And it gets rather complicated.
But ultimately - you should not do that. If you need to intercept multiple controller invocations, use an mvc-interceptor. If you really need to use an aspect, you can get the response if it is passed as argument to the intercepted method.