property-placeholder location from another property

Question

I need to load some properties into a Spring context from a location that I don\'t know until the program runs.

So I thought that if I had a PropertyPlaceholderConf

Answer 1

The problem here is that you're trying to configure a property place holder using property placeholder syntax :) It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation - spring can't resolve your ${my.location} placeholder until it's configured the property-placeholder.

This isn't satisfactory, but you could bodge it by using more explicit syntax:

<bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer">
   <property name="location">
      <bean class="java.lang.System" factory-method="getenv">
         <constructor-arg value="my.location"/>
      </bean>
   </property>
</bean>

Answer 2

You can do this with a slightly different approach. Here is how we configure it. I load default properties and then overrided them with properties from a configurable location. This works very well for me.

<bean id="propertyPlaceholderConfigurer"
        class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
        <property name="systemPropertiesModeName" value="SYSTEM_PROPERTIES_MODE_OVERRIDE" />
        <property name="locations">
            <list>
                <value>classpath:site/properties/default/placeholder.properties
                </value>
                <value>classpath:site/properties/${env.name}/placeholder.properties
                </value>
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>