Using/converting an XML file to a Spring bean definition

Question

I have defined a Spring application context xml which will be edited by end users to add new beans.Something like:

<bean name="myBeanName1" class="com.xxx.Yyy">
    <property name="type" value="type1" />
    <property name="name" value="name1" />
    <property name="arguments" value="arg1" />
</bean>

<bean name="myBeanName2" class="com.xxx.Yyy">
    <property name="type" value="type2" />
    <property name="name" value="name2" />
    <property name="arguments" value="arg2" />
</bean>

.
.
.

Now I am asked to change this to a normal xml so that users wont be bothered by bean property and class names:

<def name="Name1">
    <type>type1</type>
    <argument>arg1</argument
</def>

<def name="Name2">
    <type>type2</type>
    <argument>arg2</argument
</def>

As my code is using the bean, how can I use the new xml with minimal code change so that it is converted to a bean definition as earlier and things work as before?.

I dont know if Spring has a solution for this out of the box. What I thought was applying stylesheet to the new xml to create my older bean. Any other better/elegant solution for this?

Edit: Now that user input is not inside the bean anymore, is it possible to use the new xml to inject to a @Component class?

Abdullah Shaikh · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-20 09:36:55Z

4

Spring supports creating custom tags. You need to create xsd schema, NamespaceHandlerm, implement BeanDefinitionParsers and make spring aware of these by creating spring.handlers & spring.schemas special files.

Have a look at Extensible XML authoring

Example:

<beans xmlns declaration goes here>
    <yournamespace:yourcustomtag id="some id">
         <yournamespace:some_other_tag your-custom-attribute="some value" />
    </yournamespace:yourcustomtag>
</beans>

edited Mar 20, 2013 at 9:36

answered Mar 20, 2013 at 7:25

Abdullah Shaikh

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2 Comments

rajesh Over a year ago

+1 Will check this out. but looks like there is some amount of coding required to achieve this. Also will this change the xml to a different format, though minor?

Abdullah Shaikh Over a year ago

Yes it will change xml to different format. Example updated in answer.

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