Alternatives

Alternatives are explicitly declared within beans.xml for them to be considered by the container for typesafe resolution, as they are disabled by default. One of the common uses of alternatives is for different deployment scenarios, such as for test deployments.

To create an alternative, a bean only requires the @Alternative annotation to be present on its type:

@Alternative
@Admin
@User
public class MockAccount implements Account { ... }

Activation of the alternative, for beans within the same archive, would need a beans.xml with:

<beans
  xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="
  http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
  http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_0.xsd">

  <alternatives>
    <class>org.cdibook.chapter2.alternatives.MockAccount</class>
  </alternatives>
</beans>