Why is my Spring ContextRefreshed event called twice?

Question

I have a Spring ApplicationListener bean registered to listen for ContextRefreshed events. For some odd reason though, I get two calls to the onApplicationEvent(ContextRefreshedEvent) method at the completion of the context initialization. Is this normal behavior or is it indicative of a problem with my configuration? I'm using Jetty 8 for my Servlet container.

My relevant web.xml configuration is as follows

<context-param>     <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>     <param-value>/WEB-INF/config/spring/spring-config.xml</param-value> </context-param> <servlet>     <servlet-name>Spring</servlet-name>     <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>     <init-param>         <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>         <param-value></param-value>     </init-param> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <listener>     <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> <servlet-mapping>     <servlet-name>Spring</servlet-name>     <url-pattern>/service/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> 

Thanks!

Answer 1

Even though you did not specify a contextConfigLocation for your DispatcherServlet it still creates a child context and the second refreshed event is for that context. Use event.getApplicationContext() to find out which context the event is for.

Answer 2

it happened to me as well, on a different event-listener. (ApplicationListener<AuthenticationFailureBadCredentialsEvent>)

I suspected the ContextLoaderListener, and when I removed the declaration from the web.xml, the app was working properly. Then I had to figure out what is its purpose, of the ContextLoaderListener...

Role/Purpose of ContextLoaderListener in Spring?

the interesting answer there is:

ContextLoaderListener is optional. Just to make a point here: you can boot up a Spring application without ever configuring ContextLoaderListener ...just the basic minimum web.xml with DispatcherServlet