Classpath scanning with Spring

Spring has a number of utilities that the framework ships with. One of them is a classpath scanner provided by ClassPathScanningCandidateComponentProvider. That is a long name and a mouthful. The class allows you to enable auto-discovery features in your own framework or code. Here is a simple example to demonstrate its use:

The constructor takes a boolean parameter to apply default filters or not. Default filters are based on annotations for @Component, @Repository, @Service and @Controller. Once you have your provider, you give it filters to zero-in on the types you are interested in. Filters implement the TypeFilter interface and Spring helpfully ships with a number of useful ones:

• AnnotationTypeFilter: filters based on annotations on the class.
• AssignableTypeFilter: filters that match based on superclass or interface.
• RegexPatternTypeFilter: matches a fully qualified class name against a regular expression.

Spring also has an AbstractClassTestingTypeFilter that allows you to write your own matcher against class metadata that spring provides for each Class/Interface that it finds.

Once you have your filters defined, you simply give the scanning provider a root package to search within and it returns you a list of BeanDefinition objects for matches. You may incorrectly assume, because of the name BeanDefinition, that this is restricted to beans in a Spring context. Thankfully, it is not, as that would severely restrict the utility value of this class. The BeanDefinition is simply a container of useful information about the class including the Class instance.