Manually instantiating Spring beans

Question

I'm trying to reuse our Spring-JDBC based DAO classes and code in a project which has a traditional Java (controller) servlet (not Spring's Dispatcher servlet). So as shown below, I tried to launch the application-config.xml manually using ClassPathXmlApplicationContext. However, I get the error shown further below.

private static final String CONFIG_PATH = "classpath*:application-config.xml";

private signupDao SignupDao;


ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(CONFIG_PATH);

signupDao = context.getBean(SignupDao.class);

org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No qualifying bean of type [com.abc.dao.SignupDao] is defined at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.getBean(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:371) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.getBean(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:331) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.getBean(AbstractApplicationContext.java:968)

Earlier, I did not add the following entry to application-config.xml but even after adding it, I still get the same error as above ("No qualifying bean of type is defined").

<bean id="signupDao" class="com.abc.dao.SignupDao"></bean>

Any ideas?

The controller servlet is not my own, I get it from a third party, I'm only trying to extend their handlers which is where I'm trying to use Spring autowiring, JDBC etc.

EDIT:

The only bean I'm able to load is context.getBean(MessageSource.class), none of my beans can be loaded. getBeanDefinitionNames is returning empty array when I tried earlier. Do you think this is a classpath issue?

Answer 1

1. Remove the classpath*: portion from the CONFIG_PATH because ClassPathXmlApplicationContext already looks in the class path for the file (look at it's name);

2. Ensure that your application-config.xml file is in the root of your web application's WEB-INF/classes directory, otherwise it will not be in the classpath (this assumes that the file is not packaged in another jar).

Answer 2

To narrow down the problem make sure that the ApplicationContext you're creating is successfully created.

This should return all of the beans' names from the given application context.

 context.getBeanDefinitionNames();

Update

If the ApplicationContext does not list any beans from your xml config, that might be an indication that the resource file is not accessible by the ClassPathXmlApplicationContext.

One way to check is to do something like this:

ClassPathXmlApplicationContext.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("application-config.xml")

This should return a valid not null stream in case the resource is accessible.

Note the format of the resource name. It should not include any prefixes like classpath: or classpath*: