Exclude subpackages from Spring autowiring?

I am using @ComponentScan as follows for the same use case. This is the same as BenSchro10's XML answer but this uses annotations. Both use a filter with type=AspectJ

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jdbc.DataSourceAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jersey.JerseyAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jms.JmsAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jmx.JmxAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.FilterType;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ImportResource;

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = { "com.example" },
    excludeFilters = @ComponentScan.Filter(type = FilterType.ASPECTJ, pattern = "com.example.ignore.*"))
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

It seems you've done this through XML, but if you were working in new Spring best practice, your config would be in Java, and you could exclude them as so:

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "net.example.tool",
  excludeFilters = {@ComponentScan.Filter(
    type = FilterType.ASSIGNABLE_TYPE,
    value = {JPAConfiguration.class, SecurityConfig.class})
  })

I'm not sure you can exclude packages explicitly with an <exclude-filter>, but I bet using a regex filter would effectively get you there:

 <context:component-scan base-package="com.example">
    <context:exclude-filter type="regex" expression="com\.example\.ignore\..*"/>
 </context:component-scan>

To make it annotation-based, you'd annotate each class you wanted excluded for integration tests with something like @com.example.annotation.ExcludedFromITests. Then the component-scan would look like:

 <context:component-scan base-package="com.example">
    <context:exclude-filter type="annotation" expression="com.example.annotation.ExcludedFromITests"/>
 </context:component-scan>

That's clearer because now you've documented in the source code itself that the class is not intended to be included in an application context for integration tests.


For Spring 4 I use the following
(I am posting it as the question is 4 years old and more people use Spring 4 than Spring 3.1):

@Configuration
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.example", 
  excludeFilters = @Filter(type=FilterType.REGEX,pattern="com\\.example\\.ignore\\..*")) 
public class RootConfig {
    // ...
}