Maintaining ApplicationContext in custom wrapper

[ArtVandelay]

Hi all.

Using Spring across an API layer that is meant for use in both the Web and EJB layers. I have a collection of DAO's managed by the Spring container, and I want to correctly manage the instance of the ApplicationContext so that it is created and the config parsed only once. I have seen in the documentation (and Rod's book) that falling back to the singleton in this case may make sense. I am wondering if I can have a POJO factory class which wrapps a static BeanFactory:

public class DAOFactory
{
    private static ApplicationContext context;

    public DAOFactory()
    {
    }
    
    static
    {
        try
        {
            context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("app-config.xml");
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

    protected BeanFactory getBeanFactory()
    {
        return context;
    }
    
    public Object getBean(String name)
    {
        return getBeanFactory().getBean(name);
    }

    public UserDAO getUserDAO()
    {
        return (UserDAO).getBean("UserDAO");
    }

Any issues with this approach? Do I need to wrap the DAOFactory as a singleton as well?

[irbouho]

You can also make your DAOFactory implements ApplicationContextAware and configure it as a POJO. This way, DAOFactory will be aware of other beans configured in other contexts.
For eaxmple, if your are using OpenSessionInViewFilter, which is a web compenent, you need to configure the same SessionFactory for both the filter and the DAOs.