Intentionally setting a Spring bean to null

Question

I\'m using Spring to inject JMS connection factory into my Java application. Since this factory is only required within the production environment, not while I\'m developing

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that Spring won't allow you to associate null with a bean id or alias. You can handle this by setting properties to null.

Here's how you did this in Spring 2.5

<bean class="ExampleBean">
    <property name="email"><null/></property>
</bean>

In Spring 3.0, you should also be able to use the Spring expression language (SpEL); e.g.

<bean class="ExampleBean">
    <property name="email" value="#{ null }"/>
</bean>

or any SpEL expression that evaluates to null.

And if you are using a placeholder configurator you could possibly even do this:

<bean class="ExampleBean">
    <property name="email" value="#{ ${some.prop} }`"/>
</bean>

where some.prop could be defined in a property file as:

some.prop=null

or

some.prop=some.bean.id