Spring - Injecting a dependency into a ServletContextListener

Question

I would like to inject a dependency into a ServletContextListener. However, my approach is not working. I can see that Spring is calling my setter method, but later on when contextInitialized is called, the property is null.

Here is my set up:

The ServletContextListener:

public class MyListener implements ServletContextListener{      private String prop;      /* (non-Javadoc)      * @see javax.servlet.ServletContextListener#contextInitialized(javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent)      */     @Override     public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {         System.out.println("Initialising listener...");         System.out.println(prop);     }      @Override     public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {     }      public void setProp(String val) {         System.out.println("set prop to " + prop);         prop = val;     } } 

web.xml: (this is the last listener in the file)

<listener>   <listener-class>MyListener</listener-class> </listener>  

applicationContext.xml:

<bean id="listener" class="MyListener">   <property name="prop" value="HELLO" /> </bean>   

Output:

set prop to HELLO Initialising listener... null 

What is the correct way to achieve this?

Answer 1

The dogbane's answer (accepted) works but it makes testing difficult because of the way beans are instantiated. I prefere the approach suggested in this question :

@Autowired private Properties props;  @Override public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent sce) {     WebApplicationContextUtils         .getRequiredWebApplicationContext(sce.getServletContext())         .getAutowireCapableBeanFactory()         .autowireBean(this);      //Do something with props     ... }