4.5.1.3.5. Controller Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection in controllers can be used to acquire references to utilized objects. For this purpose it is required to declare either a field of the corresponding type or a write access method (setter) with an appropriate parameter type and with one of the following annotations:

  • @Inject – the simplest option, where an object for injection will be found according to the field/method type and the name of the field or attribute corresponding to the method according to JavaBeans rules.

  • @Named("someName") – explicitly defines the name of the target object.

The following objects can be injected into controllers:

  • This screen’s visual components defined in the XML-descriptor. If the attribute type is derived from Component, the system will search for a component with the corresponding name within the current screen.

  • Actions defined in the XML-descriptor – see Actions. The Action Interface.

  • Datasources defined in the XML-descriptor. If the attribute type is derived from Datasource, the system will search for a datasource with the corresponding name in the current screen.

  • UserSession. If the attribute type is UserSession, the system will inject an object of the current user session.

  • DsContext. If the attribute type is DsContext, the system will inject the DsContext of the current screen.

  • WindowContext. If the attribute type is WindowContext, the system will inject the WindowContext of the current screen.

  • DataSupplier. If the attribute type is DataSupplier, the corresponding instance will be injected.

  • Any bean defined in the context of a given client block, including:

  • If nothing of the mentioned above is appropriate and the controller has companions, a companion for the current client type will be injected, if the types match.

It is possible to inject parameters passed in a map to the init() method into the controller using @WindowParam annotation. The annotation has the name attribute which contains the parameter name (a key in the map) and an optional required attribute. If required = true and the map does not contain the corresponding parameter a WARNING message is added to the log.

An example of the injection of a Job entity passed to the controller’s init() method:

@WindowParam(name = "job", required = true)
protected Job job;