My app-config.xml has a definition for my UserDao bean:

  <bean id="userDao" class="com.blah.core.db.hibernate.UserDaoImpl">
        <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
    </bean>

I have my component scanning:

<context:component-scan base-package="com.blah" />

My index action in my HomeController works fine (it outputs the contents of a method on my UserService to a freemarker template).

@Controller
public class HomeController {

    @Autowired
    private UserService userService;




    @RequestMapping("/")
    public ModelAndView Index() {



        ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView();

        mav.setViewName("index");
        mav.addObject("message", userService.sayHello());

        mav.addObject("username", userService.getTestUser());


        return mav;
    }

The 'getTestUser()' is a new method that makes reference to UserDao, it looks like:

@Service
public class UserServiceImpl implements UserService{

    @Autowired
    UserDao userDao;

    public String sayHello() {

        return "hello from user service impl part 2";

    }

    public String getTestUser() {


        return userDao.getById(1L).getUsername();

    }


}

I am getting the error:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'userServiceImpl': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Could not autowire field: com.blah.core.db.hibernate.UserDao com.blah.core.services.UserServiceImpl.userDao; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No matching bean of type [com.blah.core.db.hibernate.UserDao] found for dependency: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. Dependency annotations: {@org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired(required=true)}

1. What could the issue be?
2. If I didn't do autowire, what would I be doing instead of adding the @AutoWire on the UserDao definition.