I had an Ldap class and it had a bunch of boilerplate methods in it; setting up the connection, getting a numeric attribute from a string, getting a string attribute from a number, etc. They were used by higher level methods for getting specific attributes from Ldap.

It occured to me that I could clean things up by putting all of the boilerplate stuff in a separate abstract class, LdapBase, and then have my Ldap class implement LdapBase.

But my original Ldap class had a bunch of fields that are being set by Spring and now that they're in the abstract LdapBase class it won't be instantiated by spring so they won't get set. I could move those fields into the Ldap class, but that clutters it up with junk it doesn't need to know about.

Could someone explain to me how to go about doing this?