Placeholder trick in Spring

Hello everyone! In the Spring Framework (I use Spring 2.5), we can use property placeholders in the spring xml-based configuration file. I wrote simple example that consist of four beans. Two of them are simple beans, one is a factory and one is a result bean that we want to get from factory bean.

<?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-2.0.xsd">

    <bean id=”simpleFactory” class=”c om.blogger.dooman87.SimpleFactory”>

        <constructor-arg value=”$ {com.blogger.dooman87.resultBeanName}”>

    </bean>

    <bean id="resultBean" factory-bean=”s impleFactory”/>

    <bean id="simpleBeanFirst"

        class="com.blogger.dooman87.SimpleBeanFirst"/>

    <bean id="simpleBeanSecond"

        class="com.blogger.dooman87.SimpleBeanSecond"/>

</beans>

In this case, we should write additional class com.blogger.dooman87.SimpleFactory, that would instantiate result by first constructor argument. This class we can extend from AbstractFactoryBean. But as well we are able to replace the factory! This simple trick you can see below:

<?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-2.0.xsd">

    <alias name="${com.blogger.dooman87.resultBeanName}" alias="resultBean"/>

    <bean id="simpleBeanFirst"

        class="com.blogger.dooman87.SimpleBeanFirst"/>

    <bean id="simpleBeanSecond"

        class="com.blogger.dooman87.SimpleBeanSecond"/>

</beans>

We created alias for result bean, where the name is a placeholder value. That's all. Hope this post was interesting or you.