How to bridge Spring Application Context events to an other context

Question

I have a Spring web application with two contexts: one (applicationContext) built by ContextLoaderListener and a second (webContext) built by DispatcherServlet.

Within the applicationContext is a bean (org.springframework.security.authentication.DefaultAuthenticationEventPublisher) that fires spring context events.

But the receiver for the event is defined in the webContext. And that receiver did not get the event. (If put the receiver for test purpose in the applicationContext then it get the event, but I can not do this, because I need the webContexts for its functionality.)

So my question is, how to bridges the events from the applicationContext to webContext?

Answer 1

I had the same problem, solved mine by moving the beans creating the event to web-context. However you can solve your problem by manually wiring your event listener, something like this (this code is not compiled therefore it is untested):

@Component    
public class BeanInWebContext implements ApplicationListener<SomeEvent> {

    @Autowired
    private ApplicationContext webContext;

    @PostConstruct
    public void registerAsListener() {
        // get parent context
        AbstractApplicationContext appContext = (AbstractApplicationContext) webContext.getParent();
        // register self as a listener, this method is in AbstractApplicationContext
        appContext.addApplicationListener(this);
    }

    @Override
    public void onApplicationEvent(SomeEvent event) {
    }

}