DX-First Thinking: Why I Added @EnableTenantIsolation to My Spring Boot Starter
Day 3 of building multi-tenant-springboot-starter was less about code, more about mindset.
I wanted developers to switch between DATABASE, SCHEMA, and SHARED isolation strategies for tenants. The default Spring Boot way would be
application.yml:
tenant:
strategy: DATABASE
That works, but I asked myself:
“What would it look like if Spring had built this?”
So I created:
@EnableTenantIsolation(strategy = TenantIsolationStrategy.SCHEMA)
💡 This annotation uses ImportBeanDefinitionRegistrar and EnvironmentAware to inject the tenant.strategy key into the Spring Environment — before anything binds.
What I learned:
Boot auto-config works great, but it doesn’t understand your custom annotations — unless you bridge them using @import(…)
The BEAN_CONTAINER trick in JPA is mandatory when manually wiring multiple EntityManagerFactoryBeans — without it, entity scanning breaks
Key Takeaway:
Framework-level DX is about thinking like Spring, not just using it.
Tomorrow: schema-per-tenant Hibernate integration.
Repo: github.com/rahul-s-bhatt/multi-tenant-springboot-starter
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