Question

I have an ApplicationContext.xml file with the following node:

<context:property-placeholder 
location="classpath:hibernate.properties, classpath:pathConfiguration.properties" />

It specifies that both properties files will be used by my application.

Inside pathConfiguration.properties, some paths are defined, such as:

PATH_ERROR=/xxx/yyy/error
PATH_SUCCESS=/xxx/yyy/success

A PathConfiguration bean has setters for each path.

The problem is: when some of those mandatory paths are not defined, no error is thrown. How and where should I handle this problem?

Answer 1

The standard behaviour of the PropertyPlaceholder that is configured via <context:property-placeholder ... /> throws an exception when a property cannot be resolved once it is required in some place as long as you do not configure it otherwise.

For your case if you have a Bean that requires some properties like this, it will fail when the value cannot be resolved. For example like this:

public class PropertiesAwareBean {

  @Value("${PATH_ERROR}")
  private String errorPath;

  String getErrorPath() {
    return errorPath;
  }

}

If you want to relax the PropertyPlaceholder and don’t make it throw an Exception when a property cannot be resolved you can configure the PropertyPlaceholder to ignore unresolvable properties like this <context:property-placeholder ignore-unresolvable="true" ... />.