Question

Is there any way to reference the current application context in a bean config file in Spring?

I am trying to do something like this:

<beans
    xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-3.0.xsd">

    <bean id="some-bean-name" class="com.company.SomeClass">
        <constructor-arg>
            <!-- obviously this isn't right -->
            <bean ref=#{this}/>
        </constructor-arg>
    </bean>

The issue is that SomeClass needs an ApplicationContext instance in its constructor. Is there any way to get the reference of the ApplicationContext that is loading the beans? I know that I can do all of the loading in the XML, but that is not quite what I am after as I need to do the bean loading in my java code.

Answer 1

Have you looked at implementing ApplicationContextAware? It doesn’t come in on the constructor, but it does happen before an init() call, and will happen just after bean properties are populated.

Invoked after population of normal bean properties but before an init
callback such as InitializingBean.afterPropertiesSet() or a custom
init-method. Invoked after
ResourceLoaderAware.setResourceLoader(org.springframework.core.io.ResourceLoader),
ApplicationEventPublisherAware.setApplicationEventPublisher(org.springframework.context.ApplicationEventPublisher)
and MessageSourceAware, if applicable.

public class SomeClass implements ApplicationContextAware {
    //your class definition
    private ApplicationContext myContext;

    public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext context) throws BeansException {
        myContext = context;
        //load beans here maybe?
    }
}

You can also just @Autowire(d) it if using Spring 2.5 or later.

public class SomeClass {
    //your class definition
    @Autowired
    private ApplicationContext myContext;
}

Of course, doing either of these will tie your code to Spring.