Question

I am learning Spring and I would just like to ask is there a way to assign values to Bean properties during runtime?
All of the examples that I have tried in the internet and books usually implement hard-coded values in xml files.

For example a short tutorial found in this website http://www.dzone.com/tutorials/java/spring/spring-bean-setter-injection-1.html

The User class has getter and setter methods but all of its values are hard-coded at beans.xml. I tried setting values to User’s member variables via the setter method in main() but I got alot of errors.

So am just wondering if this is possible, if it is I would greatly appreciate if you can show short samples or websites that has this tutorial. Thanks in advance.

Exception in thread "main" org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Unexpected failure during bean definition parsing
Offending resource: class path resource [SimpleValues.xml]
Bean 'insertValues'; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: <property> element for property 'name' must specify a ref or value
Offending resource: class path resource [SimpleValues.xml]
Bean 'insertValues'
    -> Property 'name'
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.FailFastProblemReporter.error(FailFastProblemReporter.java:68)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.ReaderContext.error(ReaderContext.java:85)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.error(BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.java:324)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.parseBeanDefinitionElement(BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.java:579)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.parseBeanDefinitionElement(BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.java:477)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.parseBeanDefinitionElement(BeanDefinitionParserDelegate.java:446)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.processBeanDefinition(DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.java:311)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.parseDefaultElement(DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.java:202)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.parseBeanDefinitions(DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.java:181)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.doRegisterBeanDefinitions(DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.java:140)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.registerBeanDefinitions(DefaultBeanDefinitionDocumentReader.java:111)
    //More errors 

this is my xml file

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

    <bean id="insertValues" class="com.SimpleValues.SimpleValues">
        <property name="name"/> 

        <property name="age"/>

        <property name="height"/>

    </bean>

</beans>

main method

public static void main(String[] args) {

        GenericXmlApplicationContext ctx = new GenericXmlApplicationContext();
        ctx.load("SimpleValues.xml");
        ctx.refresh();

        SimpleValues inject = (SimpleValues) ctx.getBean("insertValues");
        inject.setName("Andres");
        inject.setAge(20);
        inject.setHeight(7);

        System.out.println("Name: "+ inject.getName()+ " Age: "+inject.getAge()+ " Height: "+inject.getHeight());
    }

Answer 1

If you read the errors, you’ll see it’s complaining (correctly) that your XML is invalid (you’re using ill-formed <property/> nodes. Assuming you really do have code elsewhere which obtains a reference to insertValues and calls the setters, then simply remove the 3 <property/> nodes from your XML.

That is, just use:

<bean id="insertValues" class="com.SimpleValues.SimpleValues" />

That will create your insertValues bean and not call any of the setters.