Question

Am trying to get the application context in my JSP page.
I have the following scriptlet in JSP.

       WebApplicationContext appCtx = WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext(config.getServletContext()); 
       MyClass myClass = (MyClass)(appCtx.getBean("myClass"));

When using this a null pointer exception is getting thrown for the application context.
What am I doing wrong here?
I dont have a application-context.xml file because I dont need one. I have the usual dispatcher-servlet.xml with handler mappings.

Also, as an added info:
I am trying to access this “myClass” object which is being injected using PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer which reads from external environmental variables and injects to “myClass”. Any pointers?

Update:

I tried using “RequestContextUtils” as suggested but now am getting “No WebApplicationContext found: not in a DispatcherServlet request” exception.
The JSP in which I am trying to access the bean is the entry point of the application .
My view resolver looks like this,

    <bean id="viewResolver"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <property name="prefix">
        <value>/WEB-INF/views/</value>
    </property>
    <property name="suffix">
        <value>.jsp</value>
    </property>
    <property name="exposedContextBeanNames">
        <value>myClass</value>
    </property>
   </bean> 

The JSP am trying to access is outside of this “views” folder. Please advise

Answer 1

WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext() returns an application context associated with ContextLoaderListener (i.e. applicationContext.xml).

To get a context associated with DispatcherServlet you need to call RequestContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(request).

Alternatively, you can configure InternalResourceViewResolver to expose beans as attributes. Then you can access beans in JSP as ${myClass}. You can expose all beans by setting exposeContextBeansAsAttributes to true (I think it incurs some performance penalty), or explicitly list beans to be exposed with exposedContextBeanNames.