Question

We have a web application with both a root application context (applicationContext.xml) and a dispatcher servlet (dispatcher-servlet.xml) defined in our web.xml like so:

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext*.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

...

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>dispatcher</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
    </servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Due to the access restrictions, we obviously cannot access any of the DispatcherServlet beans from the root parent context.

But, what we’d like to be able to do is access the sibling beans. For example, in our dispatcher-servlet.xml we have:

<bean id="firstController" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.multiaction.MultiActionController">
    ...
</bean>

<bean id="secondController" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.multiaction.MultiActionController">
...
</bean>

How can we access the secondController from inside firstController, without requiring that it be passed in as a constructor-arg, or set as a property?

We’re using WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(...) to access siblings in the root applicationContext.xml, but we’d like to do the same thing in the child context. (From within one of the children.)

Answer 1

you can get an ApplicationContext object using

ClassPathXmlApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("dispatcher-servlet.xml")

This is assuming dispatcher-servlet.xml is in class path. context object has to be cached.
Then use context.getBean() to access beans from any where.

Other option seems to be , use overloaded method where we can pass the context attribute name. I have not used it.
WebApplicationContextUtils.getWebApplicationContext(ServletContext sc, String attrName)