Question

I have a package containing annotated entity classes that I import into my web project.
When tomcat deploys the project the entity class that are in the jar are not scanned for annotations. is there a way to tell spring to search for annotated classes inside a jar file? i.e. :

<context:component-scan base-package="{path to jar or something}"/>

Answer 1

If you mean @Entity annotated classes, <context:component-scan> has nothing to do with them. @Entity classes are discovered by Hibernate, so you need to configure Hibernate, not Spring.

If you use Hibernate via JPA (i.e. you have persistence.xml), you need to add the following line to persistence.xml in order to scan /WEB-INF/lib/yourFileWithEntities.jar for entity classes:

<jar-file>lib/yourFileWithEntities.jar</jar-file>