How do I create multiple Spring beans of the same type without defining each one

Issue

I've seen a lot of workaround-looking things regarding what I'm trying to do using BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor, but I wondered if there was a way to tap directly into Spring's bean creation API to override some behavior.

What I would like to see is something like this (note the 's' in @Components):

@Components(prefix="myBean-", numberOfInstances="${myapp.mybean.numberOfInstances}")
public class MyBean {

  private final MyService myService;

  public MyBean(final MyService myService) {
    this.myService = myService;
  }

  @Scheduled(fixedDelayString = "${myapp.mybean.fixedDelay}")
  public myJob() {
    System.out.println("I'm working!");
  }
}

I am basically looking for the same functionality of @Component where I can specify how many instances to make and just have the name generated.

As I mentioned before, the only way I have found to do this sort of thing (specifically for scheduled tasks now) is to use the BeanDefinitionRegistryPostProcessor to create the instances or create a custom SchedulingConfigurer to configure the tasks manually without using Spring beans, which means all the Runnable's dependencies have to be wired into the SchedulingConfigurer, and that just feels dirty.

Is this even possible--to add a new annotation to scan for and invoke some other way to create the beans?

Update

Thanks to @vince for helping me realize I don't need a separete bean for each job; I just have to configure the singleton multiple times into the FixedDelayTask.

@Component
public class MyBean {

  private final MyService myService;

  public MyBean(final MyService myService) {
    this.myService = myService;
  }

  // Remove @Scheduled here since we have to configure multiple
  // instances manually. This is where it would be nice to specify
  // how many jobs of the same type you want.
  // @Scheduled(fixedDelayString = "${myapp.mybean.fixedDelay}")
  public myJob() {
    System.out.println("I'm working!");
  }
}

@Configuration
@EnableScheduling
public class MyBeanTaskConfiguration implements SchedulingConfigurer {

  private final MyBean myBean;

  public MyBeanTaskConfiguration(MyBean myBean) {
    this.myBean = myBean;
  }

  @Override
  public void configureTasks(final ScheduledTaskRegistrar taskRegistrar) {
    for (int i = 0; i < numberOfWorkers; i++) {
      taskRegistrar.scheduleFixedDelayTask(
              new FixedDelayTask(
                      myBean,
                      repeatIntervalMs,
                      repeatIntervalMs / numberOfWorkers * i + startDelayMs
              )
      );
    }
  }

}

Solution

Actually I'm wondering why u wanna do this. According to the IOC philosophy, beans should be delegated to container and clients don't need to care about beans' lifecycles. That's why Spring provides @Scope to support different bean scopes like singleton/request/session. So I don't think it a good way to control the specific number of a certain bean, besides, beans should theoretically be non-stateful, thus a single instance is fairly enough.

Answered By - vince