Dealing with XML config maintenance

[rpark68]

Are there any recommendations for validating your various Spring XMLs for code changes such as renaming a class or removing a setter from a class? The concern is mostly related to the production XML, but for example WRT a name change, that name may be in multiple Spring files. I can evaluate the test XML easy enough by running the test suite and fixing any failures/errors, but it would be nice not to have to hit RuntimeExceptions to debug the production XML.

[jbetancourt]

Not runtime, of course, but the Spring IDE eclipse plug-in does validation.

[hucmuc]

I too was annoyed that I had to wait until the runtime to fix bad bean defs (with jboss, the exception trace is so long and I found it difficult to get the original exception).

So I wrote a simple ant target to validate my spring files:

<target name="validate-spring">
<java fork="true" failonerror="true" classname="SpringFilesValidation">
<arg value="applicationContext-XXX.xml"/>
<arg value="applicationContext-Jmx.xml"/>
...
<arg value="test/applicationContext-for-validation.xml"/>
<classpath>
<pathelement path="${classes.dir}"/>
<path refid="path.classpath"/>
</classpath>
</java>
</target>

public class SpringFilesValidation {

public static void main(String[] files) {
try {
System.out.println(" Validating springs files...");
// Disable the logging (was too verbose and not necessary)
System.setProperty("org.apache.commons.logging.Log ", "org.apache.commons.logging.impl.NoOpLog");
new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(files);
System.out.println(" *** Spring files are OK *** ");
System.out.println();
} catch (BeansException e) {
//e.printStackTrace(System.out);
//System.err.println();
System.err.println("############## ERROR IN APPLICATION CONTEXT ############");
System.err.println();
///printBeansException(e);
System.exit(-1);
}
System.exit(0);
}
}

It will at least validate the basic definitions and associations. But I had to override certain beans (via applicationContext-for-validation.xml) since some of them require a running app server for validation (such as Jms and JNDI lookup).

Dino

[Rod Johnson]

The org.springframework.test package is handy for integration tests that are still outside the server. So no phone book stack traces.