Property-Placeholder not failing when properties file not present

Hi, I've run into somewhat of an odd issue, although someone else might be able to explain it. Essentially, I have 3 application context XML files:

A.xml

Code:

---

<import resource="B.xml" />
<import resource="C.xml" />

---

B.xml

Code:

---

Does some imports...
Defines some beans...

---

C.xml

Code:

---

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:nonexistent-file.properties" />

<bean id="context" class="org.somepackage.SomeClass" init-method="initialize" scope="singleton">
  <constructor-arg value="${someprop.propname}"/>
</bean>

---

If I start the A.xml context, I receive an error that says "Could not resolve placeholder..." for the bean with id "context". This is somewhat suprising since the properties file doesn't exist so I would assume it should never make it this far. If I then comment out the import of B.xml, and start A.xml again, I then get an exception because the properties file is not found, which seems like the correct behavior.

Does anyone have any ideas why this might happen?

Thanks

One thing I forgot to mention, B.xml also uses a property-placeholder.

Also, I swapped the order of the imports, and now I'm getting a "property not resolved" exception through a transitive import with B.xml.

My apologies, I've discovered what was happening. I was under the impression that this was being caused by the imports. As it turns out, it seems to have been because of multiple property placeholders. I added the ignore-unresolvable attribute and now things are working as expected. I'm wondering though, are these semantics captured in the documentation somewhere? I assume they are because I discovered this through a post on the forums. But it wasn't completely obvious to me from either the reference manual or Javadocs.