Qualifier annotation in Spring Framework

Question

What do you understand by @Qualifier annotation used in Spring Framework?

Answer 1

When you create more than one bean of the same type and want to wire only one of them with a property you can use the @Qualifier annotation along with @Autowired to remove the ambiguity by specifying which exact bean should be wired.

For example, here we have two classes, Employee and EmpAccount respectively. In EmpAccount, using @Qualifier its specified that bean with id emp1 must be wired.

Employee.java

public class Employee
{
private String name;
@Autowired
public void setName(String name)
{ this.name=name; }
public string getName()
{ return name; }
}

EmpAccount.java

public class EmpAccount
{
private Employee emp;
@Autowired
@Qualifier(emp1)
public void showName()
{
System.out.println(“Employee name : ”+emp.getName);
}
}