Question

we were using spring 2.5, we want to add make sure that my properties should be either provided from the environment config_path=C:/application.properties or overrides from default location that is classpath

So we did it as below
applicationcontext.xml

<bean class="com.test.utils.ExtendedPropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="overridingSource" value="file:${config_path}/application.properties"/>
    <property name="locations" value="classpath*:META-INF/*-config.properties" />
</bean>

ExtendedPropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer code

public class ExtendedPropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer extends PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer implements InitializingBean, ApplicationContextAware {

    private ApplicationContext applicationContext;

    private Resource overridingSource;

    public void setOverridingSource(Resource overridingSource) {
        this.overridingSource = overridingSource;
    }

    @Override
    public void setApplicationContext(ApplicationContext applicationContext) throws BeansException {
        this.applicationContext = applicationContext;
    }

    @Override
    public void afterPropertiesSet() throws Exception {
        MutablePropertySources sources = ((ConfigurableApplicationContext) applicationContext).getEnvironment().getPropertySources();
        if (overridingSource == null) {
            return;
        }
        sources.addFirst(new ResourcePropertySource(overridingSource));
    }
}

Now we are moving this to spring 3.1.2 and can help me out weather spring has provided some new API to do it more efficient way?

Answer 1

Spring 3.1 introduced a new Environment Abstraction, PropertySource Abstraction (both links show SpringSource Blog articles).

But I think you do not need to override it in spring 3.0 or 3.1

<bean class="org.springframework.context.support.PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer">
    <property name="locations">
        <list>
            <value>classpath*:application-config.properties</value>
            <value>file:${user_config_path}/application-config.properties</value>
        </list>
    </property>
    <property name="localOverride" value="true" />
    <property name="ignoreResourceNotFound" value="true" />
</bean>

BTW. in Spring 3.0 the bean class is: PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer (see this blog http://www.baeldung.com/2012/02/06/properties-with-spring/)