Location of ApplicationContext.xml and properties file in spring

Question

In my application I have placed the ApplicationContext xml file in src and the project is working fine.
Can we place the ApplicationContext.xml in

Answer 1

There are couple of ways you can do this:

In Spring MVC, You mention dispatcher-servlet in web.xml as follows

 
          mvc-dispatcher
            
                      org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
            
            1

Now this by default will look for a file named mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml. That is, the servlet name appended by -servlet.xml. And it will look for this file in class path.

Alternatively which fits your case, if you already have xml file and don't want to rename it, add the following entry in web.xml in addition to the servlet entry above.

 
    contextConfigLocation
    /WEB-INF/conf/ApplicationContext.xml
 

Here you can choose any location inside WEB-INF. Put the properties file in classes folder so that it could be found in classpath. Since you are using Eclipse embedded Tomcat, put the following as your bean configuration for property placeholder.