Comments on: Spring application context loading tricks

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:20:08 +0000

It’s a little difficult to see exactly what’s going on here, since your XML tags didn’t make it into the posted comment. But the way it looks to me right now, only the dispatcher-servlet-config.xml will be loaded since it is passed to the dispatcher servlet as a servlet init param (and all the beans will be loaded into the namespace of the servlet).

The web-application-config.xml will NOT be loaded, since you have not defined a ContextLoaderListener. If you DO include such a listener, then both context files will be loaded. The beans from web-application-config.xml will be available to the dispatcher-servlet and any other servlet you load; the beans from the dispatcher-servlet-config.xml will only be available to the dispatcher-servlet.

By: Coder

Coder — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:38:55 +0000

In my web.xml we have mentioned contextConfigLocation twice like below in this order. Could you pls tell which one will be picked up as contextConfigLocation file

contextConfigLocation
/WEB-INF/config/web-application-config.xml

dispatcher-servlet
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet

contextConfigLocation
/WEB-INF/config/dispatcher-servlet-config.xml

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:31:30 +0000

Hi BenBourne,

Sounds to me like that “spring” directory is not on your classpath.

By: BenBourne

BenBourne — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:02:21 +0000

Hi Ben,
I have a issue with loading spring-aplication-context.xml.
it is clealry mentioned in web.xml also as:
classpath:spring/spring-aplication-context.xml
where spring is a folder inside which spring-aplication-context.xml resides.
The application is not getting loaded and says filenotfound for spring-aplication-context.xml.
The project is a maven project.
What can be the possible error?

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:46:30 +0000

Err, no, it doesn’t. The classpath: prefix refers to the application’s classpath and means that resources will be retrieved from locations on that classpath (although at a given point in time that might indeed include the current working directory). An absolute location without a classpath: prefix is an absolute location and a relative location is relative to the working directory of the application.

By: Praveenkumar Jagnala

Praveenkumar Jagnala — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:40:07 +0000

classpath refers to current directory in spring framework.

By: Praeenkumar jangala

Praeenkumar jangala — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:38:38 +0000

ApplicationContext ctx =new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(“../applicationContext.xml”);
BeanFactory beanFactory=ctx;
It works fine in my spring project

the above code is in /WEB-INF/jsp/index.jsp
but my applicationContext.xml is in /WEB-INF folder

By: Sai

Sai — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:38:22 +0000

Nice read! Thanks for taking the time out to compose this.

By: jettro

jettro — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 10:05:54 +0000

Hmm, I see I mist the whole thread of comments. Did not notice it was a response to another comment. My bad

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:04:50 +0000

Hey Jettro,

It is a “mistake” in the sense that, in and of itself, /WEB-INF is not on the classpath. So if you put your context files there and then try to load them by doing something like “classpath:*context.xml” rather than “classpath:/WEB-INF/*context.xml”, then it won’t work. And this is an easy mistake to make, since the DispatcherServlet implicitly initiates the processing of a /WEB-INF/-servlet.xml file, sort of suggesting that /WEB-INF is where you should put the context files.

Also, one might consider it a “mistake” against the style that SpringSource introduced with Spring Roo of always placing context files in the META-INF/spring directory (which, to be honest, is where you *should* put context files that are in a JAR).

Finally, it is definitely a mistake if you put the files in a /webapps/WEB-INF directory when your maven project does not have a “war” packaging. But, uhhhh……