Question

I have a spring bean defined outside my control. I want to set a property in that spring bean, is that possible from spring XML?

e.g.
a.xml (not controlled by me):

<bean id="a" class="A"/>
<bean id="b" class="B">
    <constructor-arg ref="a"/>
</bean>

b.xml (controlled by me)

<import resource="classpath:META-INF/a.xml"/>
<bean id="c" class="C"/>
<!-- here i want to set a property in bean a -->

One option, but I dont’ like it is to set the property programatically.
I’m using spring 2.5 in java.

Answer 1

You could inject the bean-a into another class and set it’s property there

<bean id="foo" class="...MySetterClass" init-method="init">
    <property name="candidateBean" ref="a"/>
    <property name="candidateProperty" value="bar"/>
</bean>

So your class MySetterClass could do something like

class MySetterClass {
    /*... Setter boilerplate */
    public void init(){
        candidateBean.setCandidateProperty(candidateProperty);
    }
}

This is a pretty ugly approach, but it should work.