Where do I put my XML beans in a Spring Boot application?

David Newcomb picture David Newcomb · Jul 28, 2015 · Viewed 45.9k times · Source

I'm getting back into Spring (currently v4). It's all wonderful now with @SpringBootApplication and the other annotations but all the documentation seems to forget to mention how I define other beans in XML!

For example I'd like to create an "SFTP Session Factory" as defined at: http://docs.spring.io/spring-integration/reference/html/sftp.html

There is a nice bit of XML to define the bean but where on earth do I put it and how do I link it in? Previously I did a:

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

to specify the file name and location but now that I'm trying to use:

ApplicationContext ctx = SpringApplication.run(Application.class);

Where do I put the XML file? Is there a magic spring name to call it?

Answer

bvulaj picture bvulaj · Jul 28, 2015

As long as you're starting with a base @Configuration class to begin with, which it maybe sounds like you are with @SpringBootApplication, you can use the @ImportResource annotation to include an XML configuration file as well.

@SpringBootApplication
@ImportResource("classpath:spring-sftp-config.xml")
public class SpringConfiguration {
  //
}