Spring Boot @Autowired with Kotlin in @Service is always null

Question

Currently I try to rewrite my Java Spring Boot Application with Kotlin. I encountered a problem that in all of my classes which are annotated with @Service the depe

Answer 1

I faced the same problem working with Kotlin but the null instance was a JpaRepository. When I added the @Transactional annotation to a method inside a service, I got a message saying Methods annotated with '@Transactional' must be overridable so I went ahead and marked both, the class and the method as open. Easy, right?! Well, not quite.

Although this compiles, I got the required repository as null at execution time. I was able to solve the problem in two ways:

1. Mark the class and ALL of its methods as open:

open class FooService(private val barRepository: BarRepository) {
    open fun aMethod(): Bar {
        ...
    }

    @Transactional
    open fun aTransactionalMethod(): Bar {
        ...
    }
}

This works but having all the methods in a class marked with open might look a bit odd, so I tried something else.

2. Declare an interface:

interface IFooService {
    fun aMethod(): Bar

    fun aTransactionalMethod(): Bar
}

open class FooService(private val barRepository: BarRepository) : IFooService {
    override fun aMethod(): Bar {
        ...
    }

    @Transactional
    override fun aTransactionalMethod(): Bar {
        ...
    }
}

This way you can still use the annotation since all the methods will be overridable and you won't need to use open everywhere.

Hope this helps =)