Question

I have a Spring (3.1.) app that has a large app-context.xml file. There is a second very small stand-alone application that needs just a few parameters from one of the beans that are configured in that xml file.

Rather than that little application instantiating the whole application context (which builds a lot of connections, etc), I just want to read in the couple of configuration parameters that are contained in that file.

I could of course create a new smaller small-app-context.xml that only has the configuration i need or put those parameters in a properties file, but then I need to maintain that information in two places, which I am trying to avoid. I know I could read in and parse the raw XML file (not exactly sure the most efficient way to do that). However, I was hoping that Spring provides a nice way to do this but I haven’t found it.

Does Spring provide a clean way to do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In Spring you can have multiple configuration files. So for the part that you would like to reuse you would create a smaller, self-contained config file. It can remain in the original project and your app-context.xml can include it. Then your new, small project could include the small config xml and you wouldn’t need to maintain the information in two locations.