Using CDI with Vaadin

CDI is a framework for injecting dependency objects in different contexts.

Contexts and dependency injection (CDI) is a framework for injecting dependency objects in different contexts. It’s part of the Java EE platform, but its purpose is similar to autowiring in Spring.

The Vaadin CDI add-on allows you to use Vaadin with CDI.

Tutorial

A tutorial application which showcases the basic usage of a Vaadin CDI application is available at https://github.com/vaadin/flow-cdi-tutorial. You can use this application example to test the different concepts and features presented in the documentation.

Starting a Project

To start a new project with CDI and Vaadin, you can get a project base for Vaadin and CDI from vaadin.com/hello-world-starters. This is a project template with the necessary configuration and dependencies included for starting to build your own application. This starter is also available for cloning from GitHub.

Add Dependencies

The vaadin-cdi add-on should be packaged in your application and deployed to an application server that’s compliant with Java EE 7 or later.

If you are a vaadin-platform user, add the following dependencies in your pom.xml. Below is an example of this:

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.vaadin</groupId>
            <artifactId>vaadin-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${vaadin.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
         <groupId>com.vaadin</groupId>
         <artifactId>vaadin-cdi</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax</groupId>
        <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
        <version>7.0</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
<dependencies>

Vaadin Version Compatibility

The version for vaadin-cdi is managed by vaadin-bom.

You need the CDI API version 1.2 and a provided implementation. In practice, because other Java EE/Jakarta EE features are used together with CDI, the simplest way to ensure compatibility is to use a Java EE 7 or later container.

Configure Vaadin CDI Add-On

No specific CDI configuration options exist.

An instance of the CDI-enabled Vaadin servlet, com.vaadin.cdi.CdiVaadinServlet, is deployed automatically, provided you don’t setup a Vaadin servlet in your web.xml or use the @WebServlet annotation. You can also customize CdiVaadinServlet to suit your setup.

Note	See Configuration Properties for more information about Vaadin servlet configuration.

Limitations

The Vaadin CDI add-on doesn’t support Hilla, because Hilla requires the use of Spring.

Docs