Passing properties to a Spring context

Question

I'm using Spring to handle RMI calls to some remote server. It is straightforward to construct an application context and obtain the bean for remote invocations from within the client:

ApplicationContext context = new ApplicationContext("classpath:context.xml");

MyService myService = (MyService ) context.getBean( "myService " );

However I don't see a simple way to pass properties into the configuration. For example if I want to determine the host name for the remote server at runtime within the client.

I'd ideally have an entry in the Spring context like this:

<bean id="myService" class="org.springframework.remoting.rmi.RmiProxyFactoryBean">
  <property name="serviceUrl" value="rmi://${webServer.host}:80/MyService"/>
  <property name="serviceInterface" value="com.foo.MyService"/>
</bean>

and pass the properties to the context from the client as a parameter.

I can use a PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer in the context to substitute for these properties, but as far as I can tell this only works for properties read from a file.

I have an implementation that addresses this (added as an answer) but I'm looking for a standard Spring implementation to avoid rolling my own. Is there another Spring configurer (or anything else) to help initialise the configuration or am I better off looking at java config to achieve this?

Answer 1

See http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=71815

TestClass.java

package com.spring.ioc;

public class TestClass {

    private String first;
    private String second;

    public String getFirst() {
        return first;
    }

    public void setFirst(String first) {
        this.first = first;
    }

    public String getSecond() {
        return second;
    }

    public void setSecond(String second) {
        this.second = second;
    }
}

SpringStart.java

package com.spring;

import java.util.Properties;

import com.spring.ioc.TestClass;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer;

public class SpringStart {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer configurer = new PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer();
    Properties properties = new Properties();
    properties.setProperty("first.prop", "first value");
    properties.setProperty("second.prop", "second value");
    configurer.setProperties(properties);

    ClassPathXmlApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext();
    context.addBeanFactoryPostProcessor(configurer);

    context.setConfigLocation("spring-config.xml");
    context.refresh();

    TestClass testClass = (TestClass)context.getBean("testBean");
    System.out.println(testClass.getFirst());
    System.out.println(testClass.getSecond());
    }
}

spring-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

    <bean id="testBean" class="com.spring.ioc.TestClass">
        <property name="first" value="${first.prop}"/>
        <property name="second" value="${second.prop}"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

Output:

first value
second value