1.8.3. Customizing Instantiation Logic with a FactoryBean

You can implement the org.springframework.beans.factory.FactoryBean interface for objects that are themselves factories.
The FactoryBean interface is a point of pluggability into the Spring IoC container’s instantiation logic. If you have complex initialization code that is better expressed in Java as opposed to a (potentially) verbose amount of XML, you can create your own FactoryBean, write the complex initialization inside that class, and then plug your custom FactoryBean into the container.
The FactoryBean interface provides three methods:

  • Object getObject(): Returns an instance of the object this factory creates. The instance can possibly be shared, depending on whether this factory returns singletons or prototypes.
  • boolean isSingleton(): Returns true if this FactoryBean returns singletons or false otherwise.
  • Class getObjectType(): Returns the object type returned by the getObject() method or null if the type is not known in advance.

The FactoryBean concept and interface is used in a number of places within the Spring Framework. More than 50 implementations of the FactoryBean interface ship with Spring itself.
When you need to ask a container for an actual FactoryBean instance itself instead of the bean it produces, preface the bean’s id with the ampersand symbol (&) when calling the getBean() method of the ApplicationContext. So, for a given FactoryBean with an id of myBean, invoking getBean("myBean") on the container returns the product of the FactoryBean, whereas invoking getBean("&myBean") returns the FactoryBean instance itself.