Ability to disable some beans in the Spring Boot auto configuration?

[aukevanleeuwen]

Looking at the Spring Boot autoconfiguration it's not all that easy to remove some of the default filters. As an example:

bodyFilters has an explicit property to disable:

logbook/logbook-spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/zalando/logbook/autoconfigure/LogbookAutoConfiguration.java

Lines 249 to 256 in fde0074

	@API(status = INTERNAL)
	@Bean
	@ConditionalOnMissingBean(BodyFilter.class)
	@ConditionalOnProperty(value = "logbook.filters.body.default-enabled", havingValue = "true", matchIfMissing = true)
	public BodyFilter bodyFilter() {
	return defaultValue();
	}

and pathFilter defaults to none():

logbook/logbook-spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/zalando/logbook/autoconfigure/LogbookAutoConfiguration.java

Lines 236 to 248 in fde0074

	@API(status = INTERNAL)
	@Bean
	@ConditionalOnMissingBean(PathFilter.class)
	public PathFilter pathFilter() {
	final List<String> paths = properties.getObfuscate().getPaths();
	return paths.isEmpty() ?
	PathFilter.none() :
	paths.stream()
	.map(path -> PathFilters.replace(path, properties.getObfuscate().getReplacement()))
	.reduce(PathFilter::merge)
	.orElseGet(PathFilter::none);
	}

but the potentially expensive JSON parsing cannot be easily disabled, because it's conditional on a JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter:

logbook/logbook-spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/zalando/logbook/autoconfigure/LogbookAutoConfiguration.java

Lines 257 to 266 in fde0074

	@API(status = INTERNAL)
	@Bean
	@ConditionalOnMissingBean(JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter.class)
	public BodyFilter jsonBodyFieldsFilter() {
	final LogbookProperties.Obfuscate obfuscate = properties.getObfuscate();
	final List<String> jsonBodyFields = obfuscate.getJsonBodyFields();
	return new JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter(jsonBodyFields, obfuscate.getReplacement());
	}

You can specify a bean with exactly the same name jsonBodyFieldsFilter, but this requires you to set spring.main.allow-bean-definition-overriding=true, which ideally I don't want to do and is quite brittle as well. Or do something like:

    @Bean
    public JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter filter() {
        return new JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter(List.of(), "") {
            @Override
            public String filter(@Nullable String contentType, String body) {
                return body;
            }
        };
    }

which is also not very nice. Maybe adding properties to them like the body filter has makes sense?

[whiskeysierra]

The JacksonJsonFieldBodyFilter depends on obfuscate.getJsonBodyFields() which defaults to an empty list.
I like how the PathFilter has the same thing with paths but checks if they are empty and defaults to a no-op.
The JSON filter should do the same imho and fallback to BodyFilter.none().

[aukevanleeuwen]

That makes sense I suppose.