Spring annotations @Repository and @Service

Question

What are the advantages of using @Repository and @Service?

Don't tell me about component scanning etc., I am looking forward to something extra benefits or features that are there if at all.

what happens if I don't use it? what is that I would be missing?

Donal Fellows · Answer 1 · 2014-04-25T09:54:05.390

73

There are a few reasons:

It's easier to target pointcuts with more specific annotations. Do not underestimate the usefulness of this!
The @Repository annotation carries with it some additional functionality: it causes exceptions to be wrapped up as DataAccessExceptions.
The @Service annotation may gain additional semantics in the future but it's not happened yet…

edited Apr 25 '14 at 09:54

answered Jun 06 '11 at 20:26

Donal Fellows

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is it DataAccessException or PersistenceException? – veer7 Apr 25 '14 at 05:37
@veer7 `DataAccessException`, like the docs say. Why do you ask? – Donal Fellows Apr 25 '14 at 09:53

Luciano Fiandesio · Answer 2 · 2011-06-06T18:51:57.900

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The @Repository annotation (introduced in Spring 2.0) and @Service annotation (introduced in Spring 2.5) are specialization of the @Component annotation.

The main advantage of using @Repository or @Service over @Component is that it's easy to write an AOP pointcut that targets, for instance, all classes annotated with @Repository.

Also, the specialized annotations help to clearly demarcate application layers (in a standard 3 tiers application).

edited Jun 06 '11 at 18:51

answered Jun 06 '11 at 18:35

Luciano Fiandesio

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Official doc: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html#beans-stereotype-annotations – gavenkoa Mar 01 '13 at 13:39

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 06 '11 at 18:37

I believe that there are two things Spring had in mind when they added these Component annotations.

They can be used to specify point cuts across all objects annotated with that sub-component. (All @Repository or all @Service pointcuts)
I think Spring also mentioned that they would be adding some future functionality to them. (I have no citation for this, I just think I read this somewhere)

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 08 '12 at 10:23

If you TDD it would be useful to carefully design (an test of course) @Services because they will benefit of full injection of all the @Autowired components you have defined.

You could implement your functionalities directly into a @Controller for example, but in this case testing will be harder and you need to define all the mock elements (quite easier in springframework 3.1 but still "bad design").

Spring annotations @Repository and @Service

4 Answers4