Can I compose a Spring Configuration File from smaller ones?

Question

I have a handful of projects that all use one project for the data model. Each of these projects has its own applicationContext.xml file with a bunch of repetitive data stuff w

Answer 1

From the Spring Docs (v 2.5.5 Section 3.2.2.1.):

It can often be useful to split up container definitions into multiple XML files. One way to then load an application context which is configured from all these XML fragments is to use the application context constructor which takes multiple Resource locations. With a bean factory, a bean definition reader can be used multiple times to read definitions from each file in turn.

Generally, the Spring team prefers the above approach, since it keeps container configuration files unaware of the fact that they are being combined with others. An alternate approach is to use one or more occurrences of the element to load bean definitions from another file (or files). Let's look at a sample:

<import resource="services.xml"/>
<import resource="resources/messageSource.xml"/>
<import resource="/resources/themeSource.xml"/>

<bean id="bean1" class="..."/>
<bean id="bean2" class="..."/>

In this example, external bean definitions are being loaded from 3 files, services.xml, messageSource.xml, and themeSource.xml. All location paths are considered relative to the definition file doing the importing, so services.xml in this case must be in the same directory or classpath location as the file doing the importing, while messageSource.xml and themeSource.xml must be in a resources location below the location of the importing file. As you can see, a leading slash is actually ignored, but given that these are considered relative paths, it is probably better form not to use the slash at all. The contents of the files being imported must be valid XML bean definition files according to the Spring Schema or DTD, including the top level element.