I noticed interesting Spring feature. One of my colleagues used it for loading whole inheritance tree of Spring beans into list. Missed that when I was studying Spring docs.

Let's have this inheritance tree of Spring beans:

In following snippet is this tree of beans loaded into list with constructor injection:

@Component
public class Nature {
	List<Animal> animals;

	@Autowired
	public Nature(List<Animal> animals) {
		this.animals = animals;
	}

	public void showAnimals() {
		animals.forEach(animal -> System.out.println(animal));
	}
}

Method showAnimals is using Java 8 lambda expression to output loaded beans into console. You would find a lot of reading about this new Java 8 feature these days.

Spring context is loaded by this main class:

public class Main {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		AnnotationConfigApplicationContext context =
				new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(SpringContext.class);

		Nature nature = context.getBean(Nature.class);
		nature.showAnimals();
	}
}

Console output:

PolarBear []
Wolf []
Animal []
Grizzly []
Bear []

This feature can be handy sometimes. Source code of this short example is on Github.