Question

Working with Java Spring, how can I overwrite the default behavior of the property-placeholders to return ‘foo’ for any property?

The current path I’m going down is to extend PropertySource as follows:

public class FooPropertySource extends PropertySource<Object> {
    private static final String DEFAULT_NAME = "foo";

    public FooPropertySource() {
        super(DEFAULT_NAME, null);
    }

    @Override
    public Object getProperty(String name) {
        return "foo";
    }
}

At this point, I have two questions:

A) What do I do with my application Context XML file? As of now, I’ve defined this as a bean…That’s about it.

B) Do I have to do anything in code to load other beans from my application context, such that they will use the FooPropertySource?

Thanks

Answer 1

You will have to register this PropertySource to be added to your application context. If you manually starting up your application context, you can do this:

    ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext();
    ctx.setConfigLocation("applicationContext.xml");
    ctx.getEnvironment().getPropertySources().addLast(new FooPropertySource());
    ctx.refresh();

If you are doing this in a web environment, you will have to register a custom ApplicationContextInitializer to intercept the application context before it is refreshed to inject in your PropertySource:

public class CustomInitializer implements ApplicationContextInitializer<ConfigurableWebApplicationContext> {
    public void initialize(ConfigurableWebApplicationContext ctx) {
        ctx.getEnvironment().getPropertySources().addLast(new FooPropertySource());
    }
}

More details here