Doc: autowire-candidate="false" does not affect autowire="byName" [SPR-15072]

[spring-projects-issues]

Senthil Kumar opened SPR-15072 and commented

According to this section of Spring Framework Reference documentation, when autowire-candidate is set to false in a bean's XML definition, it excludes the bean from the autowiring infrastructure. The section doesn't talk about any exceptions to this case.

This works when, on the depending bean, autowire is set to byType. But when it is set to byName, the autowire-candidate="false" configuration of the target bean is ignored and it is still autowired.

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Affects: 4.3.5

Reference URL: spring-attic/spring-framework-issues#146

Referenced from: commits e8a082f, 8fc65ab

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

This is an old design decision where autowire-candidate="false" only affects type-based autowiring attempts, not direct references by name... and not autowire="byName" either. While the latter may be debatable, I'm not inclined to change it at this point since autowire="byName" is an outdated mechanism to begin with. I'm therefore turning this into a documentation issue.

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

This is already mentioned in the spring-beans.xsd documentation. I've clarified it in the reference documentation as well now.