Inner inner beans

[jms137]

Hello Spring forum,

First time post here. Just learning Spring "properly" for the first time..

Is is possible to have inner inner beans in Spring? I assumed it was from the documentation yet Spring cannot successfully parse the following and I see a ClassNotFoundException

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.js.springtest.beans.NestedPropertyBean.EggCup. Egg


in the stack trace. My domain model is

NestedPropertyBean -> top level class
EggCup -> nested top level (static) class inside NestedPropertyBean
Egg -> nested top level (static) class inside EggCup

this parses ok..

<bean id="innerBeanBean" class="com.js.springtest.beans.NestedPropertyBean" >
</bean>

<bean id="eggCupBean" class="com.js.springtest.beans.NestedPropertyBean. EggCup"></bean>

but not this...

<bean id="eggBean" class="com.js.springtest.beans.NestedPropertyBean. EggCup.Egg"></bean>


Yet in Java you can do something like this:

package com.js.springtest.beans;

public class TestNestedBeans {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		NestedPropertyBean npb = new NestedPropertyBean();
		NestedPropertyBean.EggCup eggCup = new NestedPropertyBean.EggCup();		
		NestedPropertyBean.EggCup.Egg egg= new NestedPropertyBean.EggCup.Egg();//look ma no compile errors!
	}
}

which works fine. The source code is below for completeness.

Explanations appreciated. I wonder if this is a bug?
Regards,
John

package com.js.spring.test.beans;

public class NestedPropertyBean {

	public static class EggCup{

		public static class Egg{
			private int size;

			public int getSize() {
				return size;
			}

			public void setSize(int size) {
				this.size = size;
			}
		}
		
		
		private Egg egg = new Egg();
		
		public int getSize(){
			return this.egg.size;
		}
		
		public Egg getEgg() {
			return egg;
		}

		public void setEgg(Egg egg) {
			this.egg = egg;
		}
	}
	
	private EggCup eggCup = new EggCup();
	
	public int getSize(){
		return this.eggCup.getSize();
	}
	
	
	public EggCup getEggCup() {
		return eggCup;
	}

	public void setEggCup(EggCup eggCup) {
		this.eggCup = eggCup;
	}

}

[Marten Deinum]

Inner classes should be seperated by a $ not by a . In general there shouldn't be a problem with inner inner classes (which aren't inner inner beans!!!)...

[jms137]

Thanks Marten.

Yes that worked! A nasty little newbies gotcha.... nested properties should be seperated by the '.' character and nested classes by the '$', like the binary class names. It is in the documentation somewhere, I remember seeing it... but obviously only remembered after you'd told me the answer!

john