@PostConstruct not called when using Kotlin BeanDefinitionDsl

Question

It seems that the @PostConstruct method is not called when a bean is added to the context using a Kotlin BeanDefinitionDsl.

This happened to me in my own project but to create a simple way to reproduce it, here's what I did.

1. I forked the Spring example of using the Kotlin DSL https://github.com/sdeleuze/spring-kotlin-functional
2. I added a @PostConstruct to the UserHandler class. (More details below.)
3. I pushed the result here: https://github.com/benjishults/spring-kotlin-functional

So all you need to do is fork my repo and do a gradle run.

My questions are:

1. Shouldn't I expect that @PostConstruct to be called since I'm bringing the class in as a bean?
2. Am I missing a step?
3. Is this a Spring bug?

If you don't want to pull my repo, here are more details about what I did. I added this to the UserHandler class:

@PostConstruct
fun afterPropertiesSet() {
    System.out.println("AFTER PROPERTIES SET CALLED")
}

along with the import and the Gradle dependency.

The UserHandler bean is pulled into the context using a call to the bean method within a beans DSL like so:

fun beans() = beans {
    bean<UserHandler>()
    // ...
}

and this is brought into the context with:

beans().initialize(context)

Answer 1

GenericApplicationContext instantiated in the Application class does not support out of the box @PostContruct. To make it works, you should use AnnotationConfigApplicationContext instead and remove the exclude for spring-aop in the Gradle build.