RoboSpring. How to extend bean from library in project

Question

I'm want to use RoboSpring as inversion of control inside my Android application. Application consists of Android library and separate project which overrides some resources from library. And there are a lot of other projects which use this library. So library is like a basement and projects role is to change logo, theme and so on, but not a logic of application. But now I need to change some logic inside one of the applications. So I decided to use RoboSpring.

I'm created inside library's src folder file applicationContext.xml with

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
    xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util" xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/util
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context 
           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd">

    <context:annotation-config />

    <bean id="myServiceUrl" class="java.net.URL">
        <constructor-arg value="http://www.robospring.org" />
    </bean>

    <bean id="client" class="com.example.Client">
        <constructor-arg ref="clientParser"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="clientParser" class="com.example.Parser"/>

</beans>

As example I declared some beans and I need to change clientParser inside one of the projects.

Problem #1:
I can't even override file applicationContext.xml inside project because I'll get error: Error generating final archive: Found duplicate file for APK: applicationContext.xml
I should keep applicationContext.xml only inside project or inside library, but it's not good to copypaste this file in every project. I think it can be solved by using custom contextConfigLocation but not sure how.

Problem #2
Even if I succeded in overriding context.xml how could I override only part of beans, actually only one bean? Because I think files are not merging and I should override whole xml file.

Actually I'm new to inversion of control and maybe I'm chose not correct tool to solve my problem, so any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

This is a Spring related problem and you can solve it with RoboSpring as you would do it with the Spring Framework. Please have a look at this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/11834159/1210793

I propose using another name for your context definition in the library project, e.g. library-context.xml. Than you can import it from your applicationContext.xml in every related project like this:

<!-- import from the classpath of your library -->
<import resource="classpath:library-context.xml"/>

<!-- overriding the clientParser bean -->
<bean id="clientParser" class="another.Parser"/>

You can also take this approach when working with Android's Build Variants (e.g. Product Flavors) by placing Spring configurations in different source folders.

Happy Overriding!