Spring Application Context Override/Import from Classpath and Filesystem

[Peter Kolmar]

I have a spring XML (main.xml) which contains:

  <import resource="classpath:/spring/test-override.xml" />

The JAVA code is:

 ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("classpath:/spring/main.xml");

The compiled JAR contains both the main.xml and an empty test-override.xml.

For some of my testing I'd like to use a different test-override.xml that should be placed somewhere in the file system (or into [app_folder]/spring), so the testers can easily modify it w/o rebuilding the app or modifying the JAR.

How can I achieve this? I tried manipulating the classpath (by using -cp) but my app still using the empty XML from the JAR.

Thanks for the help.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Peter,
I'd welcome you to CodeRanch, but you've been a member a long time. So congrats on your first post!

The crux of the problem is that "classpath:/spring/main.xml" and "classpath:/spring/test-override.xml" are hardcoded. For the main.xml, you are already instantiating in Java code. You can change the Java code to get the value from a property file, system property, etc and point to any file you want. For the test-override one, you can still change the xml to refer to a value that comes from a property file. If you host that property file outside your jar, you make it easy to change.

I was tempted to say that ccould create an @Configuration class.

@Configuration
@ImportResource("classpath:/name")

But this doesn't work because you'd need to know the name of the resource at compile time since it is in an annotation.

[Peter Kovac]

Hi,

You can use the import resource to import any file specified by a Java System Property. So if you have something like:

<import resource="file:${override}" />  

and you pass -Doverride="/config/my_override.xml" to java it should be imported by Spring.

Also you can try to use Spring Profile if you're on Spring v3.1 or newer.

Regards,