Defining dependencies

All dependencies are defined with annotations:

public class Bean1 {
  @Inject
  private Bean2 bean2;

  @Inject(bean = "bean3")
  private Bean3 bean3;

  @Inject(type = Bean4.class)
  private Bean4 bean4;

  @Inject
  private Special[] tableOfSpecial;

  @Inject(type = Special.class)
  private Set<Special> collectionOfSpecial;

  @Inject(nullAllowed = true)
  private Bean5 bean5;
}

Kernel automatically determines type of a required beans based on field type. As a result, there is no need to specify the type of a bean in case of bean4 field.

When there are more than one bean instances matching required dependency fields, the type needs to be an array or collection. If kernel is unable to resolve dependencies, it will throw an exception unless @Inject annotation has nullAllowed set to true. This is useful to make some dependencies optional. To help kernel select a single bean instance when more that one bean will match field dependency, you may set name of a required bean as shown in annotation to field bean3.

Dependencies are inserted using getters/setters if those methods exist, otherwise they are inserted directly to the fields. Thanks to usage of setters, it is possible to detect a change of dependency instance and react as required, i.e. clear internal cache.

Warning

Kernel is resolving dependencies during injection only using beans visible in its scope. This makes it unable to inject an instance of a class which is not registered in the same kernel as a bean or not visible in this kernel scope (see Scope and visibility).

Warning

If two beans have bidirectional dependencies, then it is required to allow at least one of them be null (make it an optional dependency). In other case it will create circular dependency which cannot be satisfied and kernel will throw exceptions at runtime.