Question

I’m fairly new to Spring and I need a bean that has two properties — the second of which is an inline bean that references the first property. Something like this:

<bean id="aBean" class="com.sample.Bean">
    <property name="propertyOne" value="something" />
    <property name="propertyTwo">
        <bean class="com.sample.AnotherBean">
            <property name="propertyThree" ref="propertyOne />
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

Making propertyOne its own bean isn’t an option here. What would be the best way to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Only way that I can think of would be to create a bean for your common property and refer to this common property in both Bean and AnotherBean – any reason why this is not an option for you?

Any other way would not work, because of the dependency graph – aBean is dependent on Another Bean and so AnotherBean would get instantiated before aBean and would not be able to refer to a child bean property.

If there had not been this dependency, you could have used Spring-EL to refer to the property:

<property name="propertyThree" value="${aBean.propertyOne}"/>