Relationship between the service exporter and service importer

An exported service may depend, either directly or indirectly, on other services in order to perform its function. If one of these services is considered a mandatory dependency (has cardinality 1..x) and the dependency can no longer be satisfied (because the backing service has gone away and there is no suitable replacement available) then the exported service that depends on it will be automatically unregistered from the service registry - meaning that it is no longer available to clients. If the mandatory dependency becomes satisfied once more (by registration of a suitable service), then the exported service will be re-registered in the service registry.

This automatic unregistering and re-registering of exported services based on the availability of mandatory dependencies only takes into account declarative dependencies. If exported service S depends on bean A, which in turn depends on mandatory imported service M, and these dependencies are explicit in the Spring configuration file as per the example below, then when M becomes unsatisfied S will be unregistered. When M becomes satisfied again, S will be re-registered.

<osgi:service id="S" ref="A" interface="SomeInterface"/>

<bean id="A" class="SomeImplementation">
   <property name="helperService" ref="M"/>
</bean> 

<!-- the reference element is used to refer to a service
     in the service registry -->
<osgi:reference id="M" interface="HelperService"
     cardinality="1..1"/>

If however the dependency from A on M is not established through configuration as shown above, but instead at runtime through for example passing a reference to M to A without any involvement from the Spring container, then Spring Dynamic Modules will not track this dependency.