Field-Based Dependency Injection

In case of Field-Based DI, we can inject the dependencies by marking them with an @Autowired annotation:

public class Store {
    @Autowired
    private Item item; 
}

While constructing the Store object, if there’s no constructor or setter method to inject the Item bean, the container will use reflection to inject Item into Store.

We can also achieve this using XML configuration.

This approach might look simpler and cleaner but is not recommended to use because it has a few drawbacks such as:

• This method uses reflection to inject the dependencies, which is costlier than constructor-based or setter-based injection
• It’s really easy to keep adding multiple dependencies using this approach. If you were using constructor injection having multiple arguments would have made us think that the class does more than one thing which can violate the Single Responsibility Principle.

More information on @Autowired annotation can be found in Wiring In Spring article.