Neat meta-annotation. I completely forgot you could do that. Copying the annotations did look rather silly…

The exclude/include filters were actually taken from the 2.5 RC1 reference. I guess I need to keep an eye on how it evolves.

Thanks!
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Jing

Another option for applying custom annotations is to use Spring’s @Component as a meta-annotation. In other words:

@Component
public @interface SomeCustomAnnotation

That is still non-invasive as far as the actual annotated components are concerned:

@SomeCustomAnnotation
public class Whatever { … }

Obviously it requires a Spring-specific import in the custom annotation definition, but it does simplify configuration (it is no longer necessary to provide the ‘include-filter’ within the ‘component-scan’ element). I also wanted to point out that the ‘component-scan’ element has an attribute for disabling all default filters so that it is not necessary to provide that ‘exclude-filter’ either: use-default-filters=”false”.

Mark