Loading context in Spring using web.xml

Question

Is there a way that a context can be loaded using web.xml in a Spring MVC application?

Answer 1

From the spring docs

Spring can be easily integrated into any Java-based web framework. All you need to do is to declare the ContextLoaderListener in your web.xml and use a contextConfigLocation to set which context files to load.

The <context-param>:

<context-param>     <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>     <param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext*.xml</param-value> </context-param>  <listener>    <listener-class>         org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener    </listener-class> </listener>  

You can then use the WebApplicationContext to get a handle on your beans.

WebApplicationContext ctx = WebApplicationContextUtils.getRequiredWebApplicationContext(servlet.getServletContext()); SomeBean someBean = (SomeBean) ctx.getBean("someBean"); 

See http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframework/web/context/support/WebApplicationContextUtils.html for more info

Answer 2

You can also specify context location relatively to current classpath, which may be preferable

<context-param>     <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>     <param-value>classpath*:applicationContext*.xml</param-value> </context-param>  <listener>     <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener>