Spring bean with no id or name

Question

I\'m reviewing some Spring code, and I see a few bean defs that do not have an id or a name. The person who did it is not around to ask. The application is working fine. I am no

Answer 1

Some beans are not required to be accessed by other beans in the context file or programmatically. So as mentioned by JacobM, they don't require an id or name as they're not referenced.

Such an example would be a PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer, which reads a property file, then allows for runtime property replacement in the context definition.

The example definition would be

<bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
  <property name="location" value="myapp.properties" />
</bean>

The JavaDoc provides further documentation on this object, but further on in the file you can reference properties from your file by just using the standard template replace placeholder ${...}.