Where to put Spring applicationContext.xml in a non-web application?

Question

I am creating an application which uses Spring beans and I need to initialize ApplicationContext from xml. As it is not a server application, it doesn't have WEB-INF folder.So, where I should put the xml file?

Answer 1

The spring documentation for this topic is a little overwhelming at first. A handy starting point in the spring documentation for application context config is here

A file system xml application context is probably the easiest to start with. So:

ApplicationContext appCtx = 
    new FileSystemXmlApplicationContext("/path/to/springconfig.xml");

Use ClassPathApplicationContext if you have the xml configuration in your application class path. In this example it might be a springconfig.xml under a project directory src/config/springconfig.xml.

ApplicationContext appCtx = 
    new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("config/springconfig.xml");

If you are unsure where your springconfig.xml ends up after you have built your application, you can use the following command to list the contents of your jar:

jar -tvf myapp.jar

For a default eclipse java project, the project-home/bin directory is the start of the classpath.

A related question was asked here

Answer 2

Use ClassPathXmlApplicationContext:

ApplicationContext ctx = 
  new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml");

Or consider migrating to @Configuration:

ApplicationContext ctx = 
  new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(AppConfig.class);

where AppConfig is annotated with @Configuration and no XML is needed.

Answer 3

Check this example Spring Setter Injection

If the XML is in the applications classpath then use like this

    ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");

Otherwise if the XML is in File system then use

     ApplicationContext context = new FileSystemXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");