Support injecting a list of Spring beans

[geoand]

Originally brought up by @tpenakov

[rquinio]

Is this about
spring-DI way @Inject List<MyBean> vs CDI way @Inject javax.enterprise.inject.Instance<MyBean> ?

[tpenakov]

This is the code snipped that does not work in Spring DI module, but works on Spring:
@Autowired List<BaseProcessor> processors;
Here the BaseProcessor class is an abstract class.

[geoand]

Yes, in Quarkus one can use @Inject javax.enterprise.inject.Instance<MyBean> while in Spring DI one can do: @Autowired List<MyBean>.

If possible we should provide support for the latter syntax.

[rquinio]

The behavior is a bit tricky since there can also be producers with return type Collection<MyBean> both in Spring DI and CDI already.

From my quick tests, Spring prefers injecting first the collection of matching MyBean beans, unless there are none - due to @Named, @Qualifier etc. -, in which case it then considers injecting any Collection<MyBean> bean.

CDI (Weld) only considers the Collection<MyBean> bean obviously.

Should it be a change in Arc (to have same defaulting logic as Spring), or rather spring-di extension to re-write the relevant Collection<MyBean> injections points to inject javax.enterprise.inject.Instance<MyBean> and extract the list instead - if that's even possible ?

[geoand]

@rquinio the second solution is mostlikely the way to go