The scope 'request' defines a single bean definition which lives within a single HTTP request. That means for each HTTP request a new bean instance is created. This scope is only valid in the context of a web-aware ApplicationContext.

This scope might be very useful in using helper objects across multiple beans through out a single request. This is particularly useful as compared to passing various parameters through a long chain of methods calls which sometimes becomes unmaintainable and it's difficult to add new parameters.

Example

Since we are going to inject a 'request' scoped bean into a default 'singleton' scoped bean, we have to avoid narrower scope bean DI problem. For that we will use JSR 330 Provider approach. Here's a list of other solution.

Creating request scoped bean

@Component
@Scope(WebApplicationContext.SCOPE_REQUEST)
public class EmployeeDetails implements Serializable {
  private Employee employee;
  private int lastYearSalary;
  //getters/setters
    .............
}

public class Employee {
  private String id;
  private String name;
  private String dept;

  public Employee(String id, String name, String dept) {
      this.id = id;
      this.name = name;
      this.dept = dept;
  }
  //getters/setters
    .............
}

Injecting request bean to Controller

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/employees")
public class EmployeeController {
  @Autowired
  private Provider<EmployeeDetails> employeeDetailsProvider;
  @Autowired
  AppService appService;

  @RequestMapping("/{id}")
  public String handler(@PathVariable("id") String employeeId) {
      employeeDetailsProvider.get().setEmployee(getEmployeeById(employeeId));
      appService.findEmployeeSalary();
      return "employee-page";
  }
    .............
}

Injecting request bean to other beans

@Service
public class AppService {
  @Autowired
  private Provider<EmployeeDetails> employeeDetailsProvider;

  public void findEmployeeSalary() {
      EmployeeDetails employeeDetails = employeeDetailsProvider.get();
      Employee employee = employeeDetails.getEmployee();
      employeeDetails.setLastYearSalary(getEmployeeSalary(employee));
  }
    .............
}

Output

mvn tomcat7:run-war

As seen above, all information of EmployeeDetails is there even though they were populated in different places by autowiring. That shows a single instance of EmployeeDetails was used through out the request.

Let's make a different request:

Example Project

Dependencies and Technologies Used:

• spring-webmvc 5.0.5.RELEASE: Spring Web MVC.
• javax.servlet-api 3.0.1 Java Servlet API
• javax.inject 1: The javax.inject API.
• JDK 1.8
• Maven 3.3.9