Question

I have to load something from the database to initialize a hashMap object that I want to add to a application wide variable that all my mvc controllers can access.

I won’t be modifying this object, and I don’t care if it can only be updated when the application reloads.

Does spring MVC have a place where I can do this and have spring manage the lifecycle also?

I know servlets has the WebListener annotation:

@WebListener

But not sure if spring has this also (wrapped in their iOc container).

Answer 1

I think the best place is to declare a bean like the following:

public class MyInitializingBean {
    @PostConstruct
    private void init() {
        //do initialization here
    }
}

Then you declare that bean in your xml file, if you don’t like the annotation, there are non-annotation approaches for initializing a bean, but that gets executed when the spring context starts.