Override default-lazy-init=true for Spring bean definitions

Question

I am maintaining a large Java EE system. Most of the business logic is converted from EJB:s into POJO:s configured in several spring context configuration files. EJB:s are mostly used as Facades, that looks up the business logic spring beans from a context composed of all spring context configuration files mentioned earlier. For this we use the AbstractStatelessSessionBean provided with the spring framework.

All these configuration files have the default-lazy-init=true directive, which means that the business logic beans are not created until they are actually used by the system. This is preferable most of the time since republishing in developer mode becomes faster.

But when large merges are made, we are having problems finding all the configuration errors, such as missing dependencies.

My idea is to write some form of integration test, with the purpose of finding those errors. This means, i think, that I need to find a way to override all default-lazy-init=true declarations when creating the application context.

Is there any way of doing this programmatically, or perhaps with some test-only context file that includes all the actual context files?

Answer 1

Let's say currently you have a single applicationContext.xml file containing all bean definitions:

<beans default-lazy-init="true">

    <!-- all your beans -->

</beans>

Rename it to applicationContext-main.xml or something and remove default-lazy-init="true" attribute. Now create two applicationContext.xml files:

<beans default-lazy-init="true">

    <import resource="applicationContext-core.xml"/>

</beans>

and:

<beans default-lazy-init="false">

    <import resource="applicationContext-core.xml"/>

</beans>

As you can see the only difference is the value of default-lazy-init. During development your team can use the former version of applicationContext.xml that includes all the beans with lazy-init. On staging and testing environments switch it to the latter so that all beans included in applicationContext-core.xml are created eagerly.