Spring Qualifier Annotation

There may be a situation when you create more than one bean of the same type and want to wire only one of them with a property, in such case you can use @Qualifier annotation along with @Autowired to remove the confusion by specifying which exact bean will be wired. Below is an example to show the use of @Qualifier annotation.

Example:

Let us have working Eclipse IDE in place and follow the following steps to create a Spring application:

Step	Description
1	Create a project with a name SpringExample and create a package com.tutorialspoint under the src folder in the created project.
2	Add required Spring libraries using Add External JARs option as explained in the Spring Hello World Example chapter.
3	Create Java classes Student, Profile and MainApp under the com.tutorialspoint package.
4	Create Beans configuration file Beans.xml under the src folder.
5	The final step is to create the content of all the Java files and Bean Configuration file and run the application as explained below.

Here is the content of Student.java file:

package com.tecra;

public class Student {
   private Integer age;
   private String name;

   public void setAge(Integer age) {
      this.age = age;
   }
   public Integer getAge() {
      return age;
   }

   public void setName(String name) {
      this.name = name;
   }
   public String getName() {
      return name;
   }
}

Here is the content of Profile.java file:

package com.tecra;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier;

public class Profile {
   @Autowired
   @Qualifier("student1")
   private Student student;

   public Profile(){
      System.out.println("Inside Profile constructor." );
   }

   public void printAge() {
      System.out.println("Age : " + student.getAge() );
   }

   public void printName() {
      System.out.println("Name : " + student.getName() );
   }
}

Following is the content of the MainApp.java file:

package com.tecra;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public class MainApp {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      ApplicationContext context = 
             new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("Beans.xml");

      Profile profile = (Profile) context.getBean("profile");

      profile.printAge();
      profile.printName();
   }
}

Consider the example of following configuration file Beans.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">

   <context:annotation-config/>

   <!-- Definition for profile bean -->
   <bean id="profile" class="com.tutorialspoint.Profile">
   </bean>

   <!-- Definition for student1 bean -->
   <bean id="student1" class="com.tutorialspoint.Student">
      <property name="name"  value="Zara" />
      <property name="age"  value="11"/>
   </bean>

   <!-- Definition for student2 bean -->
   <bean id="student2" class="com.tutorialspoint.Student">
      <property name="name"  value="Nuha" />
      <property name="age"  value="2"/>
   </bean>

</beans>

Once you are done with creating source and bean configuration files, let us run the application. If everything is fine with your application, this will print the following message:

Inside Profile constructor.
Age : 11
Name : Zara

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