Load Inheritance Tree Into List With Spring

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 .