Spring Core

Spring Bean Definition Inheritance Example

Spring Bean definition inheritance- A bean definition potentially contains a large amount of configuration information, including container specific information and constructor arguments and property values. A child bean definition inherits configuration data from a parent definition. The child definition can override some values, or add others, as needed. Using parent and child bean definitions can save a lot of typing. Effectively, this is a form of templating.

@ImageSource-Slideshare.net

If you work with an ApplicationContext interface programmatically, child bean definitions are represented by the ChildBeanDefinition class. Most users do not work with them on this level, instead configuring bean definitions declaratively in something like the ClassPathXmlApplicationContext.

When you use XML-based configuration metadata, you indicate a child bean definition by using the parent attribute, specifying the parent bean as the value of this attribute.

Spring Bean definition inheritance has nothing to do with Java class inheritance but inheritance concept is same. You can define a parent bean definition as a template and other child beans can inherit required configuration from the parent bean.

Now the following example illustrate the bean definition inheritance with triangle classes and its parents classes.

Triangle.java

package com.dineshonjava.sdnext.beanDefInherit.tutorial;

public class Triangle
{
 private Point pointA;
 private Point pointB;
 private Point pointC;
 /**
  * @param pointA the pointA to set
  */
 public void setPointA(Point pointA) {
  this.pointA = pointA;
 }

 /**
  * @param pointB the pointB to set
  */
 public void setPointB(Point pointB) {
  this.pointB = pointB;
 }

 /**
  * @param pointC the pointC to set
  */
 public void setPointC(Point pointC) {
  this.pointC = pointC;
 }

 public void draw()
 {
System.out.println("PointA is ("+pointA.getX()+", "+pointA.getY()+")");
System.out.println("PointB is ("+pointB.getX()+", "+pointB.getY()+")");
System.out.println("PointC is ("+pointC.getX()+", "+pointC.getY()+")");
 }
}

Point.java

package com.dineshonjava.sdnext.beanDefInherit.tutorial;

public class Point
{
 private int x;
 private int y;
 /**
  * @return the x
  */
 public int getX() {
  return x;
 }
 /**
  * @param x the x to set
  */
 public void setX(int x) {
  this.x = x;
 }
 /**
  * @return the y
  */
 public int getY() {
  return y;
 }
 /**
  * @param y the y to set
  */
 public void setY(int y) {
  this.y = y;
 }
}
Following is the configuration file spring.xml where we defined “parentTriangle” bean which has one property “pointA”. Next there are two beans “triangle1” bean and “triangle2” bean has been defined as a child of “parentTriangle” bean by using parent attribute. The child beans inherits “pointA” property as is, and overrides “pointA” property and introduces two more properties “pointB” and “pointC.

Spring.xml

<beans xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop" xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" xmlns:>
Once you are done with creating source and bean configuration files, let us run the following application. If everything is fine with your application, this will print the following message:
Point.java
package com.dineshonjava.sdnext.beanDefInherit.tutorial;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

/**
 * @author Dinesh Rajput
 *
 */
public class DrawingApp 
{
 /**
  * @param args
  */
 public static void main(String[] args) 
 {
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("spring.xml");
Triangle triangle = (Triangle) context.getBean("triangle1");
triangle.draw();
 }
}
Now we get the following message:
Output:
Jul 1, 2012 1:43:35 AM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext prepareRefresh
INFO: Refreshing org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext@ab50cd: startup date [Sun Jul 01 01:43:35 IST 2012]; root of context hierarchy
Jul 1, 2012 1:43:35 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader loadBeanDefinitions
INFO: Loading XML bean definitions from class path resource [spring.xml]
Jul 1, 2012 1:43:36 AM org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory preInstantiateSingletons
INFO: Pre-instantiating singletons in org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory@14c1103: defining beans [parentTriangle,triangle1,triangle2,pointA,pointB,pointC]; root of factory hierarchy

PointA is (0, 0)
PointB is (-20, 0)
PointC is (20, 0)

If you observed here, we did not pass "pointA" while creating "triangle1" bean, but it got passed because of Bean Definition Inheritance.

 

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Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!

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